This week we learnt about the concept of visualization. This is a process whereby an invisible practice is made visible through visual creations. A simple example of this would be taking a set of data, such as the current fertility rate among Australians; and making this into a visual graph to represent the data.
This concept can be rather hard to comprehend at times, as it is difficult to know what types of data can be effectively communicated through visualizations. Can anything invisible be represented through graphs or other visual forms? Or are the choices quite limited?
One reading from this week which I found helpful was the website about 'information aesthetics' which can be found here http://infosthetics.com/. This gave me an idea of the types of 'invisible' concepts which can be converted into something visual, such as into any type of graph. Examples of data include depictions of the London underground, the history of poverty, or the impact of nuclear radiation. This gave me a clearer idea of the way in which almost anything can be transformed into data, as long as a suitable type of graph is used to represent it.
Limits of the visualization project may be that much more complicated data may be too difficult to represent through something as simple as a graph. An example of this might be the way in which Facebook has overtaken Myspace. This data may need to represent the amount of users for each site, the decrease in popularity of Myspace over a number of years, the present purpose of Myspace etc; and this may be difficult to represent through a graph as it includes several pieces of data within the one idea.
Our visualization group of assessments will give us a better idea of how successful these graphs can be in representing data. We will have to wait and see...
References:
Unknown. (2010). information aesthetics. Available: http://infosthetics.com/?limit=20&offset=20. Last accessed 21 April 2010
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