Week 12 - Data Visualisation

By: Hiro Sheridan on Flikr (5/08/2008) Some rights reserved.

This week's lecture with Michael Honey was one of the most interesting we've had this semester. He discussed the idea of Data Visualisation. Before the lecture i had a rough idea of what Data Visualisation from just piecing together the words data and visualisation, but i couldn't have shown you an example or anything.

By: antjeverena on Flikr (19/03/2009) Some rights reserved.

Data Visualisation is the representation of abstract or non physical information. Basically it's presenting data in an effective, visual way. The point of it is to collate meaningless data in a user friendly medium, bringing more context to information. While graphs and charts are an easy and efficient way to present small values, Data Visualisation should be employed in representing large numbers. As Michael re-iterated, statistics and figures are thrown at us every day, on the news, in the papers, at work and university and much of the time it is either ignored or taken lightly because of the way it is presented. It is a fact that humans group things in their minds to visualise and take them in easier, otherwise known as 'chunking'. The size, colour, shape, movement, position and scale of information presented visually heavily impacts on how it is perceived. I really believe in the idea of Data Visualisation, mainly because it worked on me, with the examples Michael showed anyway.

[During the lecture, Michael's computer had an error so we couldn't proceed for about ten minutes, he said we should blog about this fascinating experience, so here you go]

Hans Rosling explains how Data Visualisation works with various different statistics on TED Talks (an annual conference of informative speakers, all online for free, check it out!):




By: Hans Rosling on TED (February 2006)

You can see examples of Data Visualisation in many things you view online, like the most popular viewed articles on Digg, most searched terms on Google and Wikipedia represented in a larger font, with those that are less popular shown as smaller font in the background. Besides relieving boredom and adding necessary humour to complex issue, complete and understandable access to data like this could save lives and bring context to many issues that people don't understand. Jonathan Harris is another motivational speaker that has created the 'We Feel Fine' initiative, an 'exploration of human emotion'. Jonathan captures thoughts, feelings and actions (under six different groups) from all over the online world and presents them in a data visualisation. It really is amazing and i guarantee that all will find it thought provoking and enjoyable. Follow some of the links i've attached at the end of the post also as it's a subject that deserves attention and understanding.


By: Jonathan Harris on TED (March 2007)

Check out more on Data Visualisation:
- gapminder.org
- resilliantaustralia.org
- processing.org

And a project our very own course convener Dr. Mitchell Whitelaw is working on)
- visiblearchive.blogspot.com

By: anthony mattox on Flikr (29/01/2009) Some rights reserved.