After having seen one of the latest
TED Talks videos on data visualisation from
David McCandless, I've noticed a trend from Twitter and
Mashable toward this type of thinking. This I find interesting from a psychological perspective because it demonstrates the power of visual stimuli to the mind. I don't think anyone would deny the usefulness of a map when lost. Data can be vast swathes of forest, and easily permits confusion. A map is bound to help. Right?
Take the
WikiLeaks visualisations. A standard map with satellite imagery showing the locations of every incident in Afghanistan has been produced. What emerges before you've even formed a single word in your mind, are the clusters of dots, where a clear concentration of events has occurred.
I can predict there being more of a role in the future for visualising all that interesting data, especially on maps but also using other designs. Live visualisations of real-time web data, but with an emphasis on clean, minimal design and intuitive controls would mean anyone could assemble a meaningful data map.
I plan to take what David McCandless does but to offer a new approach, namely to offer the user the ability to create data visualisations on an ad-hoc (or near ad-hoc) basis, with various data sources etc.
The idea is then to create a user interface for data visualisations, preferably a web interface. Also necessary would be access to each of the major web APIs (say the top ten web services). I would need to find a way to map between these interfaces in a meaningful way, to allow users to generate meaningful outcomes.
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This may take some time. About a year. But that's exactly what I have in studying Computer Science MSc. I look forward to talking about it with the experts that will be teaching us.
Sounds like a plan - liked the malapropism in your the title btw. Sucker for any kind of word play. This piece reminded me of The Independent's front page today. A Word Cloud of all the key words taken from his latest memoir. Caught my imagination like data visualisation should.
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