Sometimes a graphical visualization is just what is needed to help to bring clarity to a data set. On other occasions, there’s nothing like a narrative to help explain and a mix of the two can be even better. In the 105.3 version of Oracle Analytics Cloud, the new Language Narrative visualization was introduced to apply narrative to data, so let’s see how this operates in comparison to a classic chart and also consider how working side by side they can help us interpret data.
To start, here is a simple list of UK cities and the number of days of rainfall in a table.
Loading this into Oracle Analytics Cloud, we can quickly and easily load up the data, create a bar chart and sort it. Here we can see the relative values in an attractive chart.
Let’s introduce the new Language Narrative chart type by duplicating the visualization.
Which then duplicates it and we can simply switch the visualization type to Language Narrative
This give us the ‘best of both worlds’ as we now have a descriptive narrative which has drawn our attention to an average amount and also brought in the concept of %ages as well as discussing the largest and, importantly, helping us to start thinking about groupings of data within the data set.
That is on the most verbose setting of “7” and the language insights can be tweaked by reducing the number to get more condensed narratives until that one that best fits the data for the purposes of the analysis is found.
