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Tutorial#
The Essence of Data Visualisation: Mapping from Data to Visual Properties
Presented by Hassan Kibirige, Data Scientist and Software Engineer
Read the abstract
Every plot and every table you have ever seen is doing the same thing: mapping data to visual properties. A scatter plot maps two columns to x and y positions. A colour-coded table maps values to a colour scale. A bar chart and a pie chart are the same mapping in different coordinate systems.
Once you see this, you stop memorising chart types and start reasoning about visualisation. You can look at any graphic — a plot, a table, a dashboard — and ask one question: “what maps to what?”
This workshop teaches that single idea and gives you two modern Python tools to put it into practice: plotnine for plots (the grammar of graphics in Python) and Great Tables for publication-quality tables.
Along the way, we will use a case study of a table error in the Uganda 2024 Census that triggered a national crisis — to show why visualisation is not decoration: it is how you think clearly about data.
