information analyst

Beth Kanter

http://www.bethkanter.org

Another way to articulate the importance of sense-making.

Think about it this way: Tools are not always actual objects designed to help us with physical activities. A notebook, whether it is a Moleskine or an Evernote digital document, is a tool that expands our memory. A digital calculator, whether it is an inexpensive machine bought in the nearest Dollar Tree or an app downloaded to your iPhone, frees you from the burden of having to retain and execute many complex mathematical algorithms. Non-physical tools (or sets of tools and practices), such as statistics and the scientific method, evolved to let us gaze beyond what we would normally see, and to overcome our deepest biases and lazy habits of mind. The same is true for great visual displays of information...

The point is to show how advances in imaging and data visualization technologies enable inter-disciplinary research which just a decade ago would have been impossible to conduct. There is also a somewhat artistic quality to these images, which reinforces the notion of data visualization being both art and science.

CONNECTOME: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=connectome

This seems like a straightforward question, but it’s proven to be a difficult one to answer. Even visualization researchers – people who think about the subject all day and every day – don’t have a clear definition of what visualization is. Is it synonymous with information graphics? Does visualization have to be computer generated? Does data have to be involved, or can it be abstract? The answers vary depending on who you ask.

To me, visualization is a medium. It’s not just an analysis tool nor just a way to prove a point more clearly through data.

Visualization is like books. There are different writing styles and categories, there are textbooks and there are novels, and they communicate ideas in different ways for varied purposes. And just like authors who use words to communicate, there are rules that you should always follow and others that are guidelines that you can bend and break...

OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer... An excellent way of visualizing data... Good usage of fractals.

"Big data" is a growing issue in science and industry, as modern computing has enabled large amounts of data to be captured and stored, revolutionizing many branches of science. These advances, however, also lead to challenges, such as how to explore and visualize large data sets.

The very first blue-skies idea that could have been identified with OneZoom was that of a mind map so vast that it could contain all human knowledge. The concept involved making the information easy to explore by laying it out in ever smaller bubbles using a fractal structure and a zooming interface so that the computer never runs out of space to put the information no matter how much there is.

OneZoom is committed to heightening awareness about the diversity of life on earth, its evolutionary history and the threats of extinction. This website allows you to explore the tree of life in a completely new way: it's like a map, everything is on one page, all you have to do is zoom in and out. OneZoom also provides free, open source, data visulation tools for science and education.

Information visualization is all the rage recently with everyone trying to turn their data (or any data really) into a beautiful piece of art. Typically most of these projects fail at doing justice to the data they’re trying to visualize.

Enter data hero Michael Rigley, BFA of California College of the Arts’ graphic design program. His data visualization animation is does truth to the numbers in his piece about tracing what happens to the data that we spew into the digital landscape every day. Take a look at some of the sample screens from his animation and be sure to catch the video.