Visualizations comprise a cornerstone of the data science process and community. While datasets must be scraped, cleaned, modeled, and analyzed, these projects will ultimately fail to draw many people in without the lure of attractive and engaging visualizations. Throughout my time in Flatiron School’s data science bootcamp, I have enjoyed experimenting with different types of charts, graphs, maps, and other types of visualizations, in efforts to represent a dataset in the most effective and engaging way. However, above all else, my favorite has become the heatmap, in it’s unique multi-dimensional ability to represent several perspectives at once, all in the same visualization. As I polish up my final capstone project, I have come to realize that I hold a soft spot for this method of data representation, and feel no project is complete without at least one heatmap to show for it.
Four modules later, the first project I completed in Flatiron School’s online data science program still remains my favorite project thus far. Rewind just slightly to my time as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, where I studied human geography with a focus on urban development and city demographics, specfically the gentrification of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in which I lived during my senior year. With that educational background under my belt and the majority of my childhood spent in a King County suburb just outside the city, the King County Housing Data project provided the opportunity to utilize all my prior experiences in an engaging and informative first project.
Growing up, math constantly captivated me. It’s black and white nature, combined with the thrill when more complex theories became gray around the edges. The pathways of logic I could follow in my mind. And the sense of peace I found when I could draw a clean box around my answer, at the bottom of a page filled with neat, ordered lines of mathematical reasoning. People often say that you either love math or absolutley hate it. I feel fortunate to fall into the former group. Math comforted me as a student in primary school, and that feeling has extended into my adult life as well.