A date with data

What if we stopped treating datasets like spreadsheets to be cleaned and instead approached them like conversations waiting to unfold? A Date with Data is a hands-on workshop about learning how to interrogate, investigate, and meaningfully explore a dataset before jumping into charts.

This workshop focuses on the often-overlooked phase of data visualization: curiosity. Before choosing chart types or color palettes, we will ask better questions. Who collected this data? What is missing? What patterns are hiding? What contradictions emerge? What stories are possible and which ones are misleading? Participants will learn how structured exploration can reveal visual potential that is not immediately obvious.

The workshop is designed as an interactive journey in five parts:

1. First Impressions:

Participants are given a raw dataset and asked to spend 10 minutes simply observing. They will write down initial hypotheses, curiosities, and doubts. This stage emphasizes intuition before tools.

2. Interrogation Framework:

I will introduce a practical questioning framework: contextual questions, structural questions, anomaly detection, distribution exploration, and narrative angles. We will discuss how these questions shape eventual visualization choices.

3. Exploring with Google Sheets:

Using accessible tools like Google Sheets, participants will clean, sort, filter, pivot, and derive new columns. The goal is not advanced statistics but pattern discovery. We will look at grouping, ranking, outliers, correlations, and simple calculations that surface visual opportunities.

4. AI as Research Assistant:

Participants will experiment with AI tools to generate exploratory questions, suggest transformations, summarize trends, and challenge assumptions. We will discuss both the power and limitations of AI in exploratory analysis, treating it as a collaborator rather than a replacement.

5. From Insight to Visual Potential:

Finally, participants will sketch possible visual directions on paper. The focus will be on identifying the right visual strategy based on insight rather than defaulting to familiar chart types.

Interactive elements include small group discussions, timed exploration sprints, collaborative questioning exercises, and quick sketch critiques. Participants will leave with a reusable interrogation checklist and a structured approach to exploratory analysis.

This topic matters to me because many visualization projects fail not due to design skill, but due to shallow engagement with the data itself. As someone working at the intersection of design, code, and journalism, I have seen how deeper questioning transforms ordinary datasets into compelling information experiences.

Participants will learn how to interrogate datasets systematically, uncover patterns using accessible tools, collaborate with AI responsibly, and identify meaningful visual storytelling opportunities before designing.