[MUSIC] Hi everyone, my name is Govind Acharya and I'd like to welcome you to the Fundamentals of Visualization. This is the first course with the data visualization and storytelling specialization brought to you by UC Davis Extension. I'm very excited to be a part of this. And I hope you will get a lot out of this course. I've been working in data analytics and visualization for over a decade in industry, higher education, and the nonprofit world. For both industry and higher education, I developed diversity dashboards and profiles to allow senior leaders to examine gaps in hiring and admission. In the nonprofit sector, I use data visualization to identify potential fundraising opportunities, that were not evident from simply looking at spreadsheets. A famous American baseball player and coach, Yogi Berra, once said that, you can see a lot by looking. And, he's so right. This is what data visualization is all about. It's taking a bunch of numbers and texts and transforming them into something our brain can process. This specialization will be a hands on examination of data visualization and storytelling. We're going to assume that you're new to the field of data visualization. But once you've completed the various courses within the specialization, you'll have a solid base that you can use with in your career. This particular courses been broken into four modules. In the first module, we're going to identify what types of software options are available to do visualizations and define common terminology. You will install Tableau Public software on your own computer and do a visualization. In the second module, you will navigate and practice the nuts and bolts of Tableau Public. It's a pretty intuitive piece of software, but it's important for us to be on the same page with the basics. The third module is being taught by my colleague Suk Brar. Suk has over ten years of experience in statistical and predictive analysis, data forecasting, and data visualization. He brings with him a unique perspective, as he has worked in various industries throughout his career. In that module you will prepare and import data into Tableau Public. In the final module of this course I want to take a step back and help you think about how to contextualize your questions so that the data visualizations can answer those questions. You will be able to determine how your visualization will address the who, what, and how of a data context. Again, I'm really excited you're taking this course and I think that you'll learn a lot. So let's dive right in and get started.