Extending human perception with data visualisation notes

Extending human perception
with
Data visualisation
This is taken from a talk on Big Data.
About visual tools and techniques for communicating data.
That’s a visualisation of Facebook connections.

Visualisations of big data are often beautiful but useless.
This is art, not insight.

Communicating insights are not just about pretty graphics, that’s just design porn.

“Visualization allows people to
ofﬂoad cognition to the
perceptual system, using
carefully designed images as a
form of external memory.”
Tamara Munzner
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Visualisation extends perception & memory.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager/tr/2009/VisChapter/akp-vischapter.pdf

A visualisation turns something you want to ﬁnd into something you can see.

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Late%&mesheets%
A visualisation turns something you want to ﬁnd into something you can see.

How do we extend
the human ability to
perceive data?
We make it possible for our eyes to see trends and identify differences.
Work with human perception: Senses, memory, cognition.

This can be done by using a variety of “visual search” techniques to make data “Pop out”.
Colour, size, orientation, shape, grouping, motion,

Don’t show it all at once.
Filter, Animate, Summarise,

x 133
Don’t show it all at once.
Filter, Animate, Summarise,

Look at
me!
Annotate and label – help people not get lost.

Text
Clusters
Outliers
Correlations
Patterns to look for: Clusters, outliers, extents, correlations.
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?
ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&sc
ale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&hl=en&dl=en&icon
Size=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!
ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind
_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&pit=-153914400000&hl=en_US
&dl=en&ind=false

Look at
me!
Look at
me!
Look at
me!
Minimum necessary difference.
Reduce visual noise.
Tufte: What is the minimum number of pixels required to highlight the difference between
data.

You are here
You can’t look at big data sets all at once, you can look at 2 parts of it at once to try to make
sense of them together in your mind.
Interface extends perception, allowing us to understand what it is telling us.
Total Perspective Vortex - Zaphod Bebblebrox

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