While Python is my preferred programming language for scripted data transformations, I have avoided routinely doing data visualization in Python. I could follow examples for the many Python visualization libraries, but in the end they all seemed confusing and made it hard to do the types of exploratory visualization that Tableau made easy. Finally, Altair has emerged as a viable alternative for me, because of the way it "thinks about" data and the visualization process.

Altair is a declarative statistical visualization library for Python, built on top of the well-design and powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. (Vega-lite was built for the web, includes interaction, and is being adopted as a standard by high profile websites and tools.) It works well for small to medium-sized tabular data (like spreadsheets). 

In this workshop, I’ll run you through both some introductory and some more complex examples using Altair with Python in Jupyter notebooks, so you can get a feeling for how you might use it in your own work. 

Note: This is an introductory workshop on Altair, but you’ll probably be more comfortable following along if you have at least a little bit of experience using the Python programming language, since I won’t be spending time on the language itself. (Feel free to sign up no matter what your experience level, but past students with no Python or programming experience have found it too confusing to be useful.) The classroom in which this is held has Windows computers with Python and Altair installed, so you don't need to bring a laptop.

Altair web site: https://altair-viz.github.io/
Blog post, “Why I’m backing Vega-Lite as our default tool for data visualization”: https://medium.com/@robin.linacre/why-im-backing-vega-lite-as-our-default-tool-for-data-visualisation-51c20970df39

The content of the workshop may be recorded. Cameras will capture the instructor station and the display screen. Ambient audio, including verbal audience  participation, will be included on the recording. Registration for the workshop indicates consent. If you are uncomfortable with a recording being published please contact the instructor at anytime prior to the conclusion of the workshop.