Week VIII: Forms of Expression/Forms of Content - What is Visualisation?

Considering the sheer number of information that people in our contemporary society consume, there has never been a better time to exercise our visual literacy. It would be almost impossible to fully process all of the data that we receive on our various mobile devices (phone, tablet, radio, laptop, etc.) in our everyday lives and this is causing publishers to constantly try to find new ways to disseminate information quickly and memorably. Thus visualisations have a prominent and practical role in the future.

Before beginning the readings for this week, I wasn’t aware of the many fields where visualisations could prove useful and the extent to which visualisations have filtered into several publishing platforms. As evidenced by Prismatic (2014), uses for visualisation range from accompanying journalistic stories by the New York Times and Wired to computer science to mapping public trends to psychology and neuroscience. Bonnie (2014) claims that understanding infographics will be a key skill for everyone in the workforce by 2020. I think some of these qualities are necessary and present today and will only become more pronounced as time passes.

Visualisations themselves come in many different shapes and forms. The use of line (Arnell, 2006) and colour seem to be the most popular way to represent data. Using these visual elements allows ideas to be communicated without fear of language barriers. Bick (2014) states that an individual’s interpretation of this data can be biased due to personal experiences and culture, yet that is the very nature of visualisation – absorbing information from data at an immediate, almost subconscious level.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the calorie equivalents (Wynn, 2007) because it helped me to realise that visualisations can showcase information in interesting and truthful ways. It would be interesting to see how infographics could be further applied to humanitarian issues or documenting changes in publishing (where is technology adoption booming? Which areas still prefer paperback novels?).

But what distinguishes visualisations from simple images or diagrams or models? I think the key lies in the visual metaphor and its abstract representation of data; what is being described is more specific than these other representations. Here are some examples of what I believe are visualisations:

Accompanying visuals to music played on Windows Media Player, thus creating visualisations of sound. Source: http://www.filewin.net/images/wmp24.jpg

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as an example of early visualisations of lanugage and historical events. In saying this, does this mean that written alphabets as symbols could be visualisations? Source: CJ Photo, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cjphoto/2833668951/sizes/l

Screenshot of a visualisation of bushfires in Australia from 1997 to 2008, allowing us to see which areas are more susceptible to bushfires, Source: Romsey Australia, http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/f1997-08.gif

References:

30 thought leaders in Data Visualisation 2014, Prismatic, accessed 13 September 2014, <http://getprismatic.com/story/1405797029064?utm_medium=email>.

Arnell, T. 2006, ‘the dashed line in use’, nearfield.org, accessed 12 September 2014, <http://www.nearfield.org/2006/09/the-dashed-line-in-use>.

Bick, E. 2014, ‘Emily Bick: Never mind the Quantitative’, The Wire, accessed 13 September 2014, <http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/emily-bick_never-mind-the-quantitative>.

Bonnie, E. 2014, ‘Top 10 Work Skills You’ll Need in 2020 (Infographic)’, Wrike, accessed 12 September 2014, <https://www.wrike.com/blog/08/08/2014/Top-10-Work-Skills-2020-Infographic>.

CJ Photo n.d., Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, photograph, Flickr, accessed 15 September 2014, <https://www.flickr.com/photos/cjphoto/2833668951/sizes/l>.

filewin n.d., Windows Media Player 11, screenshot image, filewin: download software, accessed 15 September 2014, <http://www.filewin.net/images/wmp24.jpg>.

Romsey Australia 2012, Australian bushfire history 1997 to 2008, graphic image, accessed 15 September 2014, <http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/f1997-08.gif>.

Wynn, L. S. 2007, ‘What Does 200 Calories Look Like?’, wiseGEEK, accessed 12 September 2014, <http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm>.

Week VII: Making the Invisible Visible

Data makes the world go ‘round. In the “information environment” (Gillespie, 2014), individuals leave behind traces of themselves through the web searches they make and which online content they engage with. This is then collected by organisations for their own purposes and it still remains unclear whether everything was obtained legally and with the full knowledge of the individual. What does this mean for publishers, both traditional and digital? What does this mean for the Average Joe?

It is evident that companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Apple dominate their respective fields, whether it is social networking, entertainment, selling products or archiving information. This power stems from capitalising on the potential of the internet early on and using algorithms and data mining to allow for immeasurable consumer and product data at their disposal (Smith, 2014; Gillespie, 2014). These companies aggressively push out their competitors while simultaneously marketing themselves as the best place to get the latest product/information, thus causing publishers and advertisers to clamour for space. The phrase “I don’t know, Google it”, Twitter hashtags, iPhones and iPads are all widely accepted as the norm. Therefore, these entities are no longer just companies; they have integrated themselves into the collective social consciousness.

This presents opportunities and problems. Lepore (2013) states that we have become “obsessed, at once, with being seen and being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity” which I believe accurately reflects contemporary society. The algorithms used to gather data can access more personal information than ever before. This can be seen positively since individuals will be able to find information and products that are relevant and interesting based on previous activity. Conversely, access to personal information raises questions about privacy on the internet. It is possible for Google to track your searches for advertisers, for Facebook to archive your chat logs and for Amazon to suggest twenty other books from one purchase (whether you enjoyed it or not). Having secure passwords doesn’t fully ensure that the program won’t use personal information unbeknownst to customers or that private content will remain private on the internet, a public domain.

A TED talk by Eli Pariser on the algorithms used by Google and Facebook (shown below) presents some interesting research on consequent outcomes from the data collected, highlights some flaws in the algorithms and facilitates discussion on how this information on users should be handled:

References:

Gillespie, T. 2014, ‘Facebook’s algorithm – why our assumptions are wrong, and our concerns are right’, Culture Digitally, 4 July, accessed 5 September 2014, <http://culturedigitally.org/2014/07/facebooks-algorithm-why-our-assumptions-are-wrong-and-our-concerns-are-right/>.

Lepore, J. 2013, ‘The prism: Privacy in an age of publicity’, The New Yorker, 24 June, accessed 5 September 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-prism?currentPage=all>.

Smith, M. 2014, ‘How much does Google really know about you?’, Make Use Of, 17 June, accessed 6 September, <http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-much-google-know-about-you/>.

What FACEBOOK and GOOGLE are hiding from the world, 2011, online video, Thoughts Awakening, 14 September, accessed 8 September 2014, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOE1HFEL8XA>.