Tableau Public’s Capacity for Clarity and Confusion
By: Joseline Salmeron
Using Tableau Public is like blindly searching for your glasses in the dark after a three hours night’s sleep. It’s a search that’s best accomplished after turning on the bedside lamp for some light. Tableau Public seems almost impossible to master on your own. You need the illuminating light afforded by tutorials and prior knowledge of spreadsheet creation and management.
My initial introduction to Tableau Software was through Tableau Desktop. Tableau Desktop offers a free one-year trial to students and charges companies and individual users a $70 flat fee for its service of Tableau Creator which includes Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep, a data-cleaning feature. It was shown to me in a journalism class and it was used as an in-class exercise where the instructor navigated us through the sophisticated interface. Upon revisiting Tableau Desktop for my own analytic purposes, I was confronted with the first obstacle: logging in. In order to upload the visualization from the offline desktop application, you had to log in through some confusing pop-up. After multiple failed attempts, I resorted to using the free Tableau Public feature online.
“You’re poking around, trying to figure [Tableau Public] out as you go”, says Mike Reilley, founder, and editor of the Journalist’s Toolbox, a YouTube channel that shares helpful tutorials on the hottest new digital tools for journalists. This was the same exact sentiment I had when I first decided to use the interface for COVID-19 data visualization. After poking around and being absolutely clueless on how to get past the first step of importing in the Excel spreadsheet, I decided to throw in the towel and follow a tutorial.
The tutorial afforded me the opportunity to follow along but it didn’t incite any critical thinking or teach me how to identify which variables are best suited for the interface’s inputs.
Tableau Public boasts some of the following qualities: fast analytics, an intuitive interface that allows anyone to use it, versatility in analyzing any data, and dashboards that enable the formation of cohesive data storytelling. And it does that. But you won’t know how to do it until you follow several tutorials. And again, I stress the necessity for prior knowledge of how to read spreadsheets. If you’re a sophomore college student trying to create some quick and neat visualization for a presentation or reporting, this isn’t the interface for you. You would be best off using Google Flourish or Datawrapper.
Another annoying quirk of Tableau Public is that the only way to save your work is to publish it. If you step away to, perhaps, have some lunch from the active workbook without publishing it, when you come back, all your hard work has vanished.
So who is this interface for?
Intended Audience
For journalists, this interface facilitates the identification of patterns, trends, and data-driven conclusions to supplement any informative piece of writing. By creating a COVID-19 dashboard, a reporter can use the data visualized to start asking other questions. Why were COVID-19 cases so high in these communities? What kind of industries do these counties house? What are these industries doing to protect workers? Data visualization tools like Tableau Public afford journalists or business professionals the ability to make connections and use them to make rhetorical arguments.
For business professionals, Tableau Software affords executives and analysts a clear-cut way to translate data into presentations and into marketing strategies. As Wikipedia puts it, Tableau Software focuses on business intelligence. Founded in 2003, it was acquired by Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) giant, in 2019 for $15.7 billion. The software was created in response to a need for a commercial outlet. A commercial outlet for Stanford research since the company’s founders were researchers at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford.
Deconstructive Consequences of Tableau Software
As we are more and more increasingly cautioned against an online world of permanence, software companies like Tableau are capable of online erasure.
On December 2, 2010, Tableau Software announced that it was removing data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public. Tableau Public was a free service at the time and the removal was prompted in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chaired the Senate Homeland Security Committee at the time.
The software company claims to have learned from the controversial deletion and accordingly changed its data policy to remove any content that is copyrighted, trademarked, obscene, pornographic, violent, or violates U.S. federal criminal law. The data policy page is considered a living document and therefore liable to change or revision.
Tableau Public claims to be an accessible product to unearth inequities and promote media literacy and yet it seems to contradict itself when it deletes visualizations doing such a thing. The fact that the actual legal data policy is a living document is worrying in that it can be changed to accommodate new surveillance or regulation laws that may stifle free speech and political dissent.
In Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age, Rushkoff says that “the outsource of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.” Data should be used as a starting point for the decision-making process, not as a means to an end. Data visualization tools separate the labor of data scraping and curation into easily digestible graphics. It creates another barrier to media and data literacy by concealing the labor, time, and education required to create such palatable visualizations. The argument can be made that Tableau software and its competitors are only useful to a niche few and aren’t as egalitarian as their site promises.
The New York Times published an interactive article on air pollution that was intended to illustrate the disparities of environmental justice globally. However, when one reads the article, the bombardment of red circles symbolizing air pollution do little to relate the plight of billions affected by air pollution. Data and its visualization tools’ biases toward depersonalization limit the rhetorical impact. Tableau Public separates data from humanity and makes one consider if it a useful approach to social justice issues such as environmental justice and COVID-19 related inequities.
Survivability and Viability
Tech culture has hailed data-driven decision-making as the only way forward for problem-solving, solution making, and policymaking. Tools like Tableau promises to continue propelling the world forward into the tech future where decisions are less and less influenced by gut impulses and other fatalistic human errors. In the past couple of years, new positions have been created in newsrooms such as head of data & analytics, senior news analytics editor, and local data reporter.
As the decline of employment in newspapers, radio, broadcast television, and cable newsrooms escalates, digital news sites are seeing an uptick in growth. Tools like Tableau software are becoming indispensable tools of the trade. My introduction to Tableau was through a journalism course in college. Stories with a personalized angle are growing more infrequent. Data-driven journalism is the reporting of the future and if you’re unable to adapt, you will be left behind.
