This popped up in my twitter feed today – it’s a photograph of a slide from a talk given by Ben Schneiderman. I’m not sure I’d call them golden rules per se, but they are definitely a very decent framework to follow:
Preparation
- Choose actionable problems and appropriate theories
- Consult domain experts and generalists
Exploration
- Examine data in isolation and contextually
- Keep cleaning and add related data
- Apply visualization and statistics: patterns, clusters, gaps, outliers, missing and uncertain data
Decision
- Evaluate your efficacy, refine your theory
- Take responsibility, own your failures
- World is complex, proceed with humility.
Professor Schneiderman’s home page is here. The link to the tweet I picked all this up from is here via Kirk Borne and Seth Grimes