The adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words” could be tweaked for data journalism to “an exploratory chart reveals the story better than descriptive statistics for a thousand rows of data.” Major newsrooms are relying on visual explorations to reveal where data points are clustered, or a clear trend, or relationships between key variables, etc. This skill – along with a solid understanding of basic statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, etc.) – will allow you to find the story in the numbers, regardless of how complex the data might be. This 5-week module covers how to use widely used visualization libraries like Plotly and GeoPandas for effective data exploration.