Tag Archives: data visualization

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Following up with Nicole’s recent post

  October 20, 2014 ,

I’m writing this blog post as a follow up to Nicole’s “Innovation and Education” post that she published on October 13. What I particularly liked about her approach to tackling the concept of innovation is that it’s not certainly necessary to “reinvent the wheel” but to take into account as many perspectives as possible when attempting to create something new. Following this line of thinking, being innovative can be seen as doing something else with knowledge and processes already available to us. In turn, it stresses the idea that innovation always comes from “somewhere”. In few cases, innovative ideas emerge our of nothing. What I have found quite helpful in applying this logic of “somewhere” is to subscribe to as many online outlets that relate to your interests. In my case this meant subscribing to the various Youtube channels of the conference series known as TED. Below is a list of channel links: TED, TED-Ed, TEDMed, TEDFellowsTalks, TEDxYouth, TEDxTalks. For those of you who are not yet familiar with the organization, TED is a conference platform that works to share ideas worth spreading. This year marks its 20th anniversary with conference presentations that deal with a broad spectrum of topics and issues coming from the fields of technology, entertainment, art, education, business, and medicine. The organization curates most of those presentations on its various YouTube channel, thereby creating an impressive archive of information and knowledge. Tapping into this knowledge can really help generate ideas that we can consider innovative. For example, … Continue reading

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Information Design or Visualizing Information

  October 2, 2014 ,

Often we present statistical data not as exclusively the numbers themselves, but as a visualization of those numbers—as charts or graphs or tables or even pictures—giving the reader or viewer a better way to understand the meaning or impact of the information.  The goal in visualization of data is clarity of meaning, though it takes awareness and care not to distort or obscure the information.  Of course, as viewers and users of graphical representations, we also need to curb our natural impulse to find charts, graphs, and elaborate visualizations to be convincing just because of their form.  But, regardless of the potential drawbacks, visualizations can be excellent communication tools, and there are many great examples; here I share two from the nineteenth century that can still inform us today and give us ideas for our new digital tools. One famous 19th century example is the map John Snow created to show the pattern of deaths in a London cholera epidemic.  He discovered that largest number of deaths were of people drinking from a certain well on Broad Street and correctly confirmed that the disease was spread through water.  For more information about the cholera outbreak and Snow’s work see the article where I got the above information. Here’s his map, the visualization of the complicated problem he was trying to solve. “Snow-cholera-map-1” by John Snow. Published by C.F. Cheffins, Lith, Southhampton Buildings, London, England, 1854 in Snow, John. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd Ed, John Churchill, New … Continue reading

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Let Me Visualize Your Words, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are

  September 14, 2014

Consider the following everyday life situation: you’ve bought a defective item, and now you are discussing return policies with a customer service agent over the phone…then maybe you are not discussing return policies at all but you want to place an order over the phone. In any event, I dare you to ask yourself if you’ve ever wondered what the agent on the line might actually look like? I am sure that we’ve all done that at one point or the other, and I am also speculating that 9 out of 10 times our intuition would fail us and the agent on the other line doesn’t look anything like the image we crafted of him or her in our minds. Now, why might this be worth noting? The inference that we can draw is that there are certain cues embedded in the human voice which, when all we have is sound, motivate us to craft an idea of the speaker in our heads. Moreover, not only do we imagine physical attributes, we also equip the voice with certain characteristics that the speaker presumably has. Succinctly put, when we only have the sound of a voice available, we are often tempted to fill in the blanks of the speaker’s personality. And this leads us to the well-grounded assumption that the human voice is shaped by the relative relationship of various parameters such as pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, inflection, and emphasis among others, which—during the act of listening—leave us with impressions about … Continue reading