The following link is a particularly well researched/documented blog entry about data visualization.
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
It has links to many very interesting visualization engines and concepts. If, like me, this sort of this fascinates you, I recommend setting aside a few hours before you embark on looking at this page. :-)
Visualisation is, of course, a major part of our cognitive processes and we, as humans, will probably require increasingly complex visualization tools to enable us to make a more complex world easier for our limited minds to understand. But looking through many of these examples, it also struck me that a great deal of analysis often took place before visualization was even possible, and I wonder whether some of the examples are not merely enabling our mind to understand, but also open the door for machines to understand each other.
How? By searching for ways to format data in a form which can be read and displayed by a machine (after all, graphical display tools are run by computers), we are stumbling on the possibility of that formatted data to be used in other ways than just being displayed on a graph.
Another thing which struck me is the worth of data visualization in reminding us of the past. I had lunch earlier this week with a French philosopher who advised me that unfortunately, one common human trait is the ability to forget the past too easily. As a result, mistakes are repeated and only a fraction of knowledge is transmitted in the long term. Trend patterns are completely obliterated.
Take a piece of software like "Flare", for example, used by some of the data visualization examples above, but not directly referred to by the article I point to above. One example which I was particularly impressed about was their "Job Voyager":
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager
Can you see which jobs you should avoid because they are, literally, dead ends? :-) Yes, reminding us of the past can point us to the future.
I hope you enjoy the visualizations.
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2 comments:
Isn't generating visualisations of data a great way of avoiding actually some work?
It's a bit like the old re-organising the filing system, or colouring in the revision timetable, as wonderful human displacement activities.
I wonder if animals have such a capacity?
Actually, it isn't a case of avoiding doing work. It's a case of making sense of an increasingly complex world.
Visualisation of data is often not performed for the sake of the data's owner or creator, but in order to explain it to a third party. You might be an expert in a field, but those who are not experts will have trouble understanding what you are on about. A diagram helps a lot.
Animals have such a capacity as well: some might say that courting dances/displays provide visualisation of data which might be otherwise difficult for an animal to explain to another.
Whether they're avoiding work is something which you'll have to check on a case by case basis, IMHO.
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