 Welcome to raw and introduction. I'm Barton Paulson. And in this course, we're going to learn a very basic principle. And that is, if you want to understand something, while humans are visual animals, and one of the best ways to do that is to learn by looking. That is, we learn a lot through data visualization. And that's what I want to talk about here. Now when you're looking for software to do data visualization, you've got a few common choices. Number one is spreadsheets. Excel and Google sheets are actually wonderful tools for visualizing data. A lot of common graphics. And I actually am a big fan of very basic bar charts. Another choice is something a little more advanced like Google charts, free online, but more sophisticated visualizations are available. Or three, you can use dedicated professional programs like Tableau or Tableau public or even click. But Tableau is going to be one of the most common choices for high end data visualization in the data science world. But in addition to these choices, spreadsheets, Google charts, Tableau, I want to mention one other even though it's a really minority kind of choice. And that's a program called raw. Now, raw is really nice for a few reasons. Number one, raw is based on something called D3.js. That stands for data driven document. It's a JavaScript library for creating really infinitely flexible visualizations. Second, raw is really easy to use. Now part of that's because it doesn't give you a lot of options. But it's a great way to get started with things. Also, raw is online. So there's nothing to install and it's universally accessible. You can use it from a Chromebook. And then finally, raw is free, which is absolutely not the case for certain programs like Tableau. To take a look at this and to get started with it, we need to go to the website raw.densitydesign.org. When you go to this website, what you see is a pretty basic interface. It's a gray page. And it says raw, and they call it the missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics. A vector graphic is a mathematically described line or a curve that scales infinitely as opposed to a raster graphic, which is like a pixel image. And I'll show you how that works a little bit later. Now, when you want to use raw, you have two basic choices. Number one is you just click right here and say use it now, it'll work in this web page. The second one is to install it locally from GitHub. Now that's a much more complicated process. I'm going to come to github.com slash density design slash raw. Now, this is a much more complicated undertaking and I'm not going to deal with it. If you're familiar with github and you're comfortable installing libraries, you might want to do that. But we're going to base this course on the online browser based version of raw. You can get a little bit of information. It talks about some of its features right here that is built on D3JS. And that it's all based in the web browser. You get a little introductory video here. And then you can get some information about the groups that are actually based out of Italy. But that's enough for right now, we should just get started on seeing how to get into raw and how to get started working with it.