TOPICS: DATA VISUALIZATION in Spring 2026 (MA1910)

In 2006, Clive Humby, a British mathematician, coined the sentence “Data is the new oil.” Lots of data is gathered every second, and we are all adapting to the amount becoming available every day. In different fields, people still struggle to find the link between the overwhelming data and our capacity to integrate it into the decision-making process. This course focus on how to properly explore, analyse, and present data to the world. A quick online search shows that the 5 top skills requested by employers in general are communication, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and analytical skills. We will incorporate them all in this class. In data analytics, the top skills requested are: databasing, business intelligence tools, Excel, and programming in Python/R. This course is an introduction to data visualization and will help students develop the numerical skills demanded by today’s employment market: data cleaning and mining, advanced Microsoft Excel (without macros), business intelligence (BI) tools such as TABLEAU, and visual and oral data communication practice. This not a course on statistics, although statistical practices will be performed to transform data into a useful form. Nor is this a data science class, since you are not expected to produce inference on your data. Rather, this is an analytics class in which we will explore, synthesize, and present data in a form legible to the general public.