Data Visualization

 I watched a video recentley focusing on a solution to big data overload or 'data glut' as David McCandless refers to it. He suggests that visualising information and seeing patterns withing it will allow us to focus on information that we find most relavant or stories that link to one another.

For his first example he uses scaling and colour to identify differences in the billion dollar o-gram, from media reports in the press. He describes them as meaningless and the only way to understand this properly is 'visually and relatively'. Through the use of his visuals he is able to identify patterns and connections from the data.
 The use of visuals also allows people to see the relevance of other figures and data when compared to the current data. The use of scaling helps this.

 He describes the visuals as a 'map'. When you are lost in information the only way to find the meaning of the data is to lay it out visually in a landscape so that your eyes can identify the key pieces.

Continuing with more examples, such as Media panic and Relationship break up times from data collected from Facebook. In these examples he finds hidden patterns and behaviour from within the data.

 The visualisations in a sense provides relief when looking into big data.

Here is a link to the video below, look for the video named ' David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization'

http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html