Respons #1
Ted Talk
David McCandless presented a Ted Talk on data visualization. He used information and data and turned it into visual diagrams, which makes it easy to grasp what’s going on. For example he showed a visual diagram of the most common fears, the higher the point on the graph the more common that fear is. This makes data easy to grasp and understand. Later on in the lecture there was a post on usatoday.com, which caught my attention, On the site there was a data visualization pole on the deaths of soldiers titled “Death in Iraq: A look at American lives lost”. This showed a graph of soldiers who lost their lives every year. I knew many soldiers have lost their lives but I didn’t realize the ration would be that high. Seeing information personated in such manner makes it easier to grasp the situation. We are able to see the soldiers’ name the year he died, rank etc. Information presented in this form makes it easier to understand as well easier to intake data. Relating back to the Ted talk when David McCandless he mentions how visualization can tell a story and helps focus only on the information which is important. This is true because this way it’s easier to pick up, from the bar graphs of soldiers deaths displayed on CNN’s website, I am able to pick up information that majority of soldier deaths were during 2010 and 2011 in Afghanistan and there age groups range mostly from 21 to 25. Seeing information displayed visually makes it easier to focus on the information which his important. Data visualization is a productive way for one to grasp the important data presented in front of us. David McCandless Talk was very informative and made me understand the productive way data visualization can tell or a story without words.
Responses 2
The art work displayed in 2008 Wired magazine caught my attention, the artist created a colour pallet using the most common colours used in certain pages of the magazine. The colour pallets are in a form of a circle with smaller circles inside it. The colour of the outer circle is the most used colour on the page and the circles on the inside are the colors which are not used as much. To create this visual the company used a custom algorithm design to extract colours from any image. This is a fun way to show the commonly used colouse on the page vs the least commonly used colours.
During class we looked at a sores code which looks into twitter feeds and picks up random words. From those words it would display a visual in which the most common used words will appear as the largest. This is similar to Wired magazine, the colour pallet for the magazine would display the most commonly used colour on the outer circle and the least used colour in the center of the circle colour pallet. The sores code in class does similar. It would take the most commonly used words and display them in a larger font and the less likely used words in a smaller font.
This is another way to visual represent data, instead of graphs it shown through various art forms. Learning about such works inspires me to create similar forms visualization for future projects.
