Tuesday, March 14, 2017

A Review on Data Visualization- Edward Tufte

Humans are visual by nature, and by translating numbers into pictures or better visual images helps to aid those to better understanding what someone is trying to convey. An example of this is Google Maps. While most maps are very plain and two colors, Google helps these maps come to life through 3-Dimentional images. This creates a better understanding of the area and something people can closer relate to.

Tufte goes on to talk about the importance of connecting data and the visual aspect by saying, "All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensional surface" (12). Tufte explains that the idea of the maker of an image has to make sense through their image for the reader. The image and the idea have to correlate together or else it won't make sense. Most of the idea not only has to do with the image but also the colors one chooses to use to correlate with it.

"Years and years of daily mapping led to this superb visualization, sunspot distribution in latitude, recorded for long time periods" (22). Not only does data visualization help unexperienced people in a field to understand a subject better, but it also helps those very familiar with something to become even more acquainted with it.

Visualizing data is very helpful to our everyday lives because it is a lot quicker and easier to just simply look at something and understand the statistics rather than read a long data sheet about it.

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