How do you make compelling visualizations that best convey the story of your data? What methods can you employ within popular Python tools to improve your plots and graphs? This week on the show, Matt Harrison returns to discuss his new book “Effective Visualization: Exploiting Matplotlib & Pandas.”

As a data scientist and instructor, Matt has been teaching the concepts of managing tabular data and making visualizations for over 20 years. Matt shares his methodology for taking a basic plot and then telling a compelling story with it. We discuss why you should limit your plot types to a few that your audience is familiar with.

We cover the resources built into pandas and Matplotlib and some of the libraries’ limitations. Matt talks about the professionally produced plots that inspired him and the process of recreating them. He also answers questions about finding data sources to practice these techniques with.

This episode is sponsored by Postman.

Course Spotlight: Using plt.scatter() to Visualize Data in Python

In this course, you’ll learn how to create scatter plots in Python, which are a key part of many data visualization applications. You’ll get an introduction to plt.scatter(), a versatile function in the Matplotlib module for creating scatter plots.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:57 – XGBoost book and interview
00:04:00 – Effective Visualization – Exploiting Matplotlib & pandas
00:04:27 – Why focus on pandas?
00:06:01 – Plotting inside of pandas
00:08:41 – How did you get involved in visualizations?
00:13:54 – Why write this book?
00:16:17 – Sponsor: Postman
00:17:09 – What are the plots you appreciate?
00:22:41 – Creating a methodology for plotting
00:24:24 – Color to spell out the story
00:27:50 – Limited and simple types of visualizations
00:31:34 – Explaining the story
00:37:19 – highlight-text library for matplotlib
00:39:02 – Video Course Spotlight
00:40:11 – Who is the audience?
00:43:19 – Why not include interactivity?
00:45:38 – Listing the references for the data
00:49:12 – Deciding on the examples and recipes
00:54:45 – Using existing visualizations as inspiration
00:55:41 – Matplotlib style sheets
00:57:54 – Finding sources of data to work with
01:04:17 – How to purchase the book
01:05:07 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:06:33 – What do you want to learn next?
01:07:36 – How can people follow your work online?
01:08:04 – Thanks and goodbye

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