The Beauty of Data Visualization (David McCandless TED talk)

I have to do a quick post about this TED talk from earlier this year. David McCandless talks about "The Beauty of Data Visualization". And it's beautiful. I've been digging around the newest website, "Information is Beautiful" having a lovely time examining all the truly lovely visualizations they've created.

I really do believe that pictures/visuals really are the next sets of vocabulary for communicating data. We have spent a lot of time in using words to describe data (and believe me, I love words), but there's so much power in a picture. And the visualization of data can give you an immediate grasping of context (accurate only if done right, of course) that words just can't quite capture.

For example, McCandless et al. produced a "Billion Dollar-o-Gram" in 2009 to give some context to those billions being thrown around. Go look at that for a second, and then come back after finding the cost to "Wall Street Revenue 2009", "Cost of Obesity Related Diseases", "Eradicate AIDS worldwide", and then "Worldwide cost of financial crisis".

McCandless talks about how the sometimes quoted "absolute figures" don't give you a whole picture - the relative presentation of data through visualization can give you a better view of the landscape. Visualization creates an information map for people to explore, and helps expose the hidden patterns among the data.

One comment he makes was interesting - he challenges the saying "data is the new oil" with a slight modification: "data is the new soil". It is this rich resource, and there is so much of it. We just have to figure out how to ask the right questions of it to get the answers.

"Let the dataset change your mindset" - the use of visualization is definitely a part of making sound decisions that can be backed up by data.