[ExI] Big Data Visualization

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Mon May 19 23:35:16 UTC 2014


Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> , 18/5/2014 12:29 AM:
 
Might I suggest, along with whatever software you choose, that you peruse a few books by Edward Tufte. 'The visual display of quantitative information', 'Envisioning Information' and a few others are real eye openers while not being boring reads despite the terribly boring sounding titles. 
Amen. They are beautiful, incisive works. I have copies both in my office and at home. 
However, while Tufte has terrific taste, it is not enough to just read him. Just because one can see that one's creations are no good doesn't mean one can create good designs: it takes a lot of effort and training to actually become able to display information in a good manner. And sometimes Tufte goes off the deep end (those microminimalist bar charts resulting from removing non-data ink are interesting as demonstrations, but hardly useful). 
This week's most useful diagram has been a simple scatter plot with one subset of data points in red while the other are mild grey. It is fairly plain to see that they lie in the right half of the cloud, and this in turn has intriguing implications. But making it took an hour of arguing with a colleague in order to figure out what we really were looking for, and a surprising amount of tweaking just to get the axes right. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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