Workshop @ VizChitra 2025

Dancing with the Stars: No-Code Data Analysis & Visualisation

#DataViz | #Stats | #Orange | #NoCode | #StorytoData

Post Workshop Resources

• Slides from the workshop & Dataset
• Aman’s blog about using Orange

Overview

How can Bollywood / Hollywood stars, Literary Fiction heroes, and Sports champs help us understand, remember, and create all this Data, Data Viz, and Stats stuff?

Taking inspiration from stories, film videos, short stories, and sports, and a using point-and-click Photoshop-like software tool, we will make data and data visualizations and stats out of them.

We will link stars to data at first and generate several charts that represent the stories we might already know. Then, we will conjure up data (from yet another movie) and develop an intuition statistical inference procedures as well. All with #OrangeDataMining and #NoCode.

Audience

Beginners, Practitioners, Moms, Dads, Data-Storytellers and Teachers

Detailed Abstract & Takeaways

We will draw from stories real life sports persons, and of course, the movies, to motivate ourselves. In effect, we will be going from Story-to-Data. This workshop will discuss and present several ideas:

• Data and Charts from Stars and their Stories
• Throwing away data is not so rash as it might seem
• How converting data into geometry is part-culture, part-tech
• Statistical inference is about creating structured surprise.

We will use Orange Data Mining, a tool created at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is a near-enough PhotoShop clone for Data Science, that sets up complex data science tasks using a simple point-and-click interface, using an array
of connected computational widgets onto a canvas.

Basic data import, visualizations, their interpretations, and some statistical procedures will be intuitively explored. We will accomplish this by fairly rapidly constructing several such Workflows, as they
are called in Orange, allowing us to get a decent amount of practice with the tool as well.

Prepare for a LOT of name-dropping, just because names are memorable !

Workshop Outline & Plan

1: Installation of Orange (15 mins)
– Download and installation
– Sample Workflows in Orange
– Widgets and what they mean
– Exploring Data in Orange
– How to make a workflow in Orange
– Exporting Orange outputs to Word / Powerpoint
– Workflow #1

2: Throwing it All Away with Brad Pitt: Data Summaries (15 mins)
– Introductory video from MoneyBall
– How throwing away data may be a good thing
– What does throwing it all away mean
– Throwing away Data using Orange
– Favourite Stats Measures in Orange
– Workflow #2

3. The Cultural Geometry of Data Viz

3a: Counting Chickens Letters with Sherlock Holmes (15 mins)
– A short story from Conan Doyle
– An inspirational chart
– How did Holmes use it (almost) to solve a crime
– Replicate that chart in Orange
– Why counting chickens is a good idea
– Workflow #3

3b: Nursery Rhymes with Ben Affleck (15 mins)
– Reciting Solomon Grundy
– An inspirational chart
– Replicate that chart in Orange
– What is Ben Affleck’s birth day?
– Why hospitals are bad places on weekends
– Workflow #4

3c: Being a Mermaid with Katie Ledecky (15 mins)
– Ek Ledecky Bhigi-Bhaagi si
– An astonishing chart
– Replicate that chart in Orange
– What does the geometry of the chart tell us
– Should we tilt our heads to see under water?
– Workflow #5

3d: Jack and Rose lived happily ever after (15 mins)
– A sombre chart
– Replicate that chart in Orange
– Was Rose really evil?
– Were the Odds tilted against Jack?
– Why drinking during a shipwreck is a good thing
– Introducing the X 2 test
– Workflow #6

3e: The Art of Surprise with Gabbar Singh (15 mins)
– Making data in Ramgadh
– Can we feign ignorance for good?
– Gabbar Singh as Permutator
– Introducing Permutation Tests
– Quantizing surprise with p-values
– Workflow #7

4. Q&A, Discussion (15 mins)

5. Brief Demo of R-in-your-browser (if you are up for it!)

About the Instructor

Arvind Venkatadri is External Faculty, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology and Adjunct Faculty, School of Commerce and Management, Dayanand Sagar University. You can find more about his teaching experience at https://www.linkedin.com/in/arvindvenkatadri/

This session is part of the Workshop Day on 28th June, 2025 for VizChitra 2025