Ang.Crilley

This weeks topic was data visualisation. I was unfamilar with what exactly this was until the commencement of this unit. The name gives a pretty acturate description though I suppose, I knew what data what and I knew what visualisation was, so put two and two together and thought it must be an image or something visual of information. This could be a very basic definition in essence, although I have developed a more thorough understanding of what it can and actually is.

Data visualisation is about the representation of a large amount of data – or information – sometimes of abstract or non physical artifacts, representing something complicated in a way which is useful and understandable to humans. The representation is usually visual, because humans are good at perceiving and measuring differences in scale, colour, shape and recognising absence or movement and positioning. These help us distinguish between things easily, as unlike computers we cannot easily process massive amounts of information and data quickly or efficiently.

Below I found at great example of a data visualisation of the US federal budget…

As exemplified in the lecture, here is a still image of the data visualistion example from ‘We feel fine’, which is an extraordinary piece of work. This specifically is the style ‘madness’, in which each dot represents a different feeling, with colours symbolizing emotion and size representing the scale in which this emotion is expressed. This way of representing all the information gathered from the web is much easier for humans to understand and recognise the vast majority of people feeling certain things, as opposed to looking at sheer numbers. This is a form of passive observation.

This site has a great visualization of an infograph representing how many sugar cubes are found in certain beverages. Originally, infographs and data visualisation seem almost the same, if not exactly, but they do have a difference. Typically an infograph deals with a signifcantly smaller amount of information or data than that of a data visualisation, you can see with the comparison between the visual interpretation of how much sugar is a bottle of coke, which is a small amount of information, whereas the ‘we feel fine’ picture is dealing with thousands and thousands of emotions, which is a huge amount of information. And although an infograph does deal with less information, it still presents to us a better understanding of something had we seen it visually as opposed to through raw data or numbers.

I came across this video on youtube about the Google API for data visualisation. It’s only short, but it briefly shows how the API works, and the transition from raw data in an excel-like spreadsheet, to a visual graph or similar. It is an example of how much easier these graphs are to understand and comprehend differences between pieces of information as opposed to the spreadsheet, and shows how easy and simple it is to use this Google API to create personal data visualisations.