About Limn
Limn is a site dedicated to data and data visualisation news and resources. There is a general focus on South Africa and African data, and on data visualisation technologies and projects. The site is owned and maintained by Jeff Fletcher, an engineer and product developer.
Much of this product development work includes market and financial analysis, and presenting the data to help make effective decisions. Providing that kind of analysis led to studying the field of data visualisation, to the point where the techniques and technologies can now be used successfully outside of product development.
The skills required for producing effective data visualisations are quite varied, and most people practising in the field have certain strengths and weaknesses. The four main areas of focus are these.
Mathematics
To analyse and extract meaningful results from data, you need to perform some manipulations and be able to summarise the numbers. This is mostly statistics, but a good engineering or computer science maths course helps a lot.
Programming
Almost all data is now in digital format, and most output is too. Doing effective manipulation of the inputs and outputs requires programming skills.
Design
The visual part of data visualisation requires an understanding of good graphic design principles to make the visualisations usable. Developing a sense of aesthetics to make them enticing requires practice.
Story telling
Perhaps the most important skill is that of story telling. It starts by being curious about something that has underlying data, and extracting an answer to the question from the data. The key to a good visualisation is to present the question and the answer as a compelling story.