The creation of a good infographic is complex: we discover a topic that people critically need to be educated about, conduct preliminary research to build a foundational knowledge, source a reliable dataset from which we analyze and draw an appropriate conclusion, pick the most apt visualizations based upon the conclusion, assemble the visualizations into an infographic, polish for readability, and publish. The process being so meticulous, it is vital that we begin strongly with an accurate and comprehensive source of data.
Start broad by browsing through Google Dataset Search, an accessible search engine that scours many official dataset repositories. Here is a quick guide! Our World in Data is also a good source. Cities, states, countries and even continents will often share data; consider Data.gov run by the United States of America or data.europa.eu run by the European Union. Consider international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, academic repositories such as Harvard Dataverse, and think tanks such as Pew Research Center. For specific domains, it may be better to go to certain organizations for datasets. For example, consider these US organizations, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for health, Bureau of Labor Statistics for the economy, and National Center for Education Statistics for education.
Make sure to download datasets as .xls or .xlsx or .csv as they are popularly compatible file formats for tools such as Excel and visualization programs such as Tableau.
For example, I started with Google Dataset Search, interested in a relatively general topic like tuition.
I found this source on Statista whose source was the NCES and there I found a massive dataset where I could download an Excel file.
I could then compare this a dataset of inflation or minimum wage during the same time period, and this could be a potential data visualization for an infographics project revolving around the economy.
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