data visualisation…
i think data visualisation is quite interesting.
Data visualisation is an excellent concept as you can establish the idea and the relationships involved by the image produced, whereas having pure mathematical statistics can be quite hard to comprehend. This is because, as explained in the tute, that humans seem to understand things better visually. I dont know the whole science behind but it does seem to make sense as we do rely heavily on our eyesight.
“Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_visualisation
Data Visualisation is basically a visual reconstruction of data (duh!) intended to display the information more effectively to viewers. Reading up on it and i found an interesting article about modern day data visualisation in Smashing Magazine. It talks about different websites and how they use data visualisation to display information to their particular market. From this you get to understand how valuable data visualisation can be, as you can refer to various images with/out information, and not have excess info in demonstrating your point/idea.
The following are examples of data visualisations in websites.
This is from TIME magazine website. This image explains the population density per square mile in the USA. This is helpful is displaying the main cities in the USA and from this you could interpret other info etc.
This is one found on Facebook, unlike the time magazine one which is purely on stats and info, this one shows how your friends know other friends. As Facebook is a friend network website, where people interact with each other. Therefore a practical use of data visualisation is to display your network and how it interacts with others.
You can see from these two examples of how diverse data visualisation can be. One is for a target market of business, government, older audience who are interested in the mass population, which can be used to help studies in various aspects from; health, economics, social etc. What i’m trying to say is that the TIME image is more in-depth with data, stats and has a broader means in information for people. The Facebook image has a much smaller target market and information, however this is still data visualisation as it demonstrates the connection of information-much like a graph but this time as an image.
This is a youtube video i found by the google developers:
Visualize your Data: Google Visualization API
The new Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. It also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large. Several of the key benefits include:
* Embed visualizations directly into your website
* Write, share and reuse visualization apps
* Create extensions to Google products, such as Google Docs.
* Use many data sources, one API
* The Visualization API is AJAX-based and includes Gadget extensions so you can easily wrap your applications as Gadgets
This like a very useful API as google has created a program that makes converting the info easy, also it allows interaction (if needed) with fellow web users.
