Data Visualization

This video immediately reminded me of conversations I had had with a friend of mine. He was explaining his field of study in college. First off, he begins by saying that he is a cartographer. I.e., he studies and draws maps. This conversation occurred within a group of peers. One friend made the comment, "Well, isn't everything already mapped out?", another chimed in, "Yeah, so what would you really do in the workplace?". He laughed and explained that he got this reaction frequently. And that no, it's not really as simple as it seems and it's not an individual, isolated profession. He told of us an internship he had working for the city of Baltimore. His position included mapping out neighborhoods including concentrations of crime areas, vacant housing, and schools. This allowed the city office to identify where community centers were needed to hopefully decrease the rate of children and adolescents entering into crime. This is a primary example of data visualization. Once our friend explained the implications and need for his skills, everyone of us in the conversation was dumbfounded and embarrassed of our ignorance but as soon as he told us about the social justice aspect to his profession, we were interested.

This video provides that there many ways for data to be artistically visualized, including cartography. What the video adds to the anecdote I provided is the underlying theme, that this visualization of data allows everyone, even the unintelligent eye, to gain some insight into the statistics that make up our society. I found that the visualization of "12 million emotions over 3 years" was extremely interesting. It is incredible to see how different artists choose different ways to illustrate statistics. How did that artist choose which shape and colors to use for each emotion? Did he/she use 12 million different emotions or was it just that so many emotions existed and were repeated over the course of 3 years which in total resulted in the elicit of emotions 12 million times. I think that the art of data visualization can result in the same amount of questions and relating that a painting from the Impressionist era may.

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