Qualitative Data Visualization
Qualitative data visualization represents non-numerical, descriptive data to help audiences understand patterns, themes, meanings, and relationships. This type of data often comes from descriptions, opinions, and personal experiences collected through interviews, observations, or open-ended survey questions.
Instead of focusing on numbers, qualitative data visualization helps explain what people say, think, or experience, and how those ideas connect to one another.
Some qualitative data visualizations focus directly on the text itself. “Pure” qualitative visualizations highlight the meanings of words using:
- Quotes
- Diagrams
- Annotations
- Thematic groupings
Other qualitative data visualizations are created by first coding and then categorizing words. Once coded, the data is counted and visually displayed to show patterns, themes, and relationships.
Books
-
Chapter 8 of Stephanie Evergreen’s Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data, “When the Words Have the Meaning: Visualizing Qualitative Data,” introduces several creative ways to visualize qualitative research.
Evergreen encourages readers to look beyond basic bar charts, word clouds, and heat maps. Instead, she presents alternatives, including:
- Images with call-out numbers or text boxes
- Journey maps that show experiences over time
- Network diagrams that reveal relationships
- Timelines and spectrum displays
These techniques help communicate insights from qualitative research in ways that are clear, engaging, and meaningful.
- In Visualizing with Text, Richard Brath reminds readers that text has been part of information visualizations since medieval times. The book includes 240 historical and contemporary examples showing how text can be used creatively and effectively to communicate information visually.
Free Resources
Tableau
Tableau is a useful tool for exploringe and visualizing qualitative data. Ken Flerlage’s A Starter Kit for Text Analysis in Tableau shows you how to:
- Clean and organize text data for analysis
- Structure data so Tableau and read and visualize it effectively
- Create visualizations including tree diagrams, word clouds, network diagrams, and barcode charts
- Build an interactive text reader that allows users to highlight specific words within a body of text.
NVivo
NVivo allows you to visually explore coded qualitative data using hierarchy charts, word clouds, concept maps, and more. The videos below provide step-by-step instructions for creating a variety of visualizations in NVivo.
• Visualization with NVivo
This one-hour webinar for the NVivo Research Network covers coding stripes, hierarchy charts, word clouds, concept maps and more.
• NVivo for 15 Mac: Visualizing Coding
This video demonstrates how to visually explore your coded data using intuitive tools like hierarchy charts, which display the relative weight of each code based on how frequently it appears across your sources. The video shows how these visualizations make it easy to identity dominant themes at a glance, helping you prioritize areas for deeper analysis.
• 9 Ways to Visualize Your Results in NVivo
This video walks through nine powerful ways to visualize qualitative data analysis results directly in NVivo, from generating word frequency clouds and charts to using cluster analysis to uncover patterns across your codes.
• NVivo: How to Create a Bar Chart
O’Reilly Online Learning
For additional books and learning materials, the O’Reilly Online Learning: Academic/Public Library Edition collection provides extensive access to eBooks and videos in computer science, IT, business, and related subjects. This resource is provided by University Libraries and is available to all Ohio State faculty, students, and staff with a valid osu.edu email address.
Workshops and Events
University Libraries offers a variety of data skills workshops and events for Ohio State faculty, students and staff throughout the academic year.