So, tell us who you are and what you do.
My name is Mike Danziger and I'm a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. I'm interested in figuring out how information visualization can be used by everyone, not just experts. I’ve also done a lot of related work with simulation.
That sounds cool. But what is information visualization?
At a basic level, information visualization is anytime you use a visual image to convey information. There are the bar graphs and timelines we all learned about starting in elementary school, but there are new, more complex visualizations being created now to represent everything from political speeches to facebook statistics to video games.
Video games?
Okay. So I play Halo3 on Xbox. 360, and lately I’ve been checking out bungie.net, which is a web platform maintained by the developers of the game and Microsoft. This platform records every single statistic of every single game of Halo 3 being played on Xbox Live every single day. They’ve been experimenting with visualizing their data by creating a geographic map of the real world that greets you upon logging in to Xbox Live in Halo3 or visiting Bungie.net indicating the locations of everyone in the world currently playing Halo. It's pretty simple but effective, and watching the global distribution of Halo players change over the course of the day can be entertaining… and informative.
I get it. So does that relate to simulation?
Well, yeah. A simulation is a dynamic model of the real world.
So how are they different?
You don’t have to visualize a simulation. For example, when I was in high school, we had a model United Nations. Students play the role of ambassadors from UN member states to debate current issues on the organization's agenda. That simulates the real world, but it isn't visual.
So they're both systems of representation that you can use to understand how different factors work and interact with each other.
Right! In a simulation, you can change one factor and see how it changes the rest of the system. When you turn that into something you can see, it’s called a visualization.
So what do you with this stuff?
I used to work at a lab at MIT where we developed visual simulations to help people learn about physics. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to make visualization more popular for everyone.
Why does that matter?
Well, these days, the field off visualization is really expanding and growing rapidly. There is so much data being generated by everyone. Everytime we use the internet, cell phone, or other digital devices, we create data. Plus, all kinds of information is becoming available online. For example, there are data about what people like to see on TV, how much they spend on junk food, etc. If you can use visualization, you can really make sense out of all that data in new ways.
So I would be able to use a visualization to track how my sister hogs the computer a million times more than I do.
Definitely. But, as you just pointed out, people can use visualization to show what they want to show. What if your sister made a visualization where your computer usage was in a bright neon color in bold letters and hers was represented by tiny letters in light gray. Even if she does hog the computer, it might look like you do.
Yeah. That would be confusing. If my computer use was in colors that catch the eyes and hers was in light gray, it would look like I use the computer more than her. Even though the graph would be representing the data, the way the data is represented is a bit dishonest.
Exactly. It is important to realize that sometimes data can be represented in a way that you can't trust. It's really important to know how to read visualization correctly. If we all get used to looking at visualizations, we can get better at figured out which ones to trust.
Try it out! | |
|
It seems like if you know how to make something, you're better at judging it. As soon as I learned how to edit videos, I noticed more how TV commercials are put together. I bet I'd understand visualizations better if I tried to make one, and I found a site that shows you how. It's called ManyEyes. ManyEyes is created by IBM's Visual Communication Lab. |
Here are some things to try on the website before we begin making our own visualization. For each of the following tasks, please remember to embed what you find and share with us why you chose that particular visaulization in a blogpost. |
|
