Data Visualisation
This weeks lecture was about Data Visualisation. Data Visualisation is a way to communicate ideas and data in a way that can often be much easier for a viewer to grasp. People (as opposed to computers) are not very good at numbers. To me the number 314159265358 is just a REALLY big number. From the size of it, I can tell that its more than the number of Weetbix that I had for Breafast, but I couldnt tell you if it was more than the number of red blood cells in my body. im not stupid (I Swear) Im just human.
What humans ARE good at are the following things;
- Scale
- Colour
- Shape
- Position
- Movement
This is what Michael described as “Visual Wetware” and in taking these five ‘skills’ into account, we are able to take these really big numbers and put together something that makes more sense to us “meat bags” (Which once again goes to show that one day in the not too distant future, Robots will rise and become overlords of our world) But I digress….
Swarm takes the stories that are currently being ‘digged’ and visualizes these stories with circles that grow and become brighter in color as they receive more diggs! You can even set it as a screensaver - nice! So, just now we have taken the numbers that done mean a hell of a lot to us, made them pretty yellow circles, and move them around the screen. PRESTO - Human engagement!
Now, as a human, I can take a look at each story, look at which circle is bigger and brighter and know which ones are popular at this moment. I dont ’need’ to know that one story had 32324343 digs and one had 34322654 - beacuse ‘that’ doesn’t look all that different to me, but I ‘do’ know what a big yellow circle looks like compared to a little yellow circle. I ‘did’ go to pre-school you know ;)
If you head over to Digg Labs you can check out a whole bunch of ways that have been created to view digg posts as they happen. Sure, you could just head over to the main digg page and read them one at a time, but there is something far more appealing about this data being presented in such a aesthetically engaging way!
