Living in the information age has lots of exciting benefits and challenges. I like to think that working with bits, which are the basic building blocks of digital information, is a lot more fun than building with atoms, relics of the past industrial age. One of the challenges with so many bits is how to see them all. An exciting branch of computer science is starting to gain much attention in the business word. It’s called Data Visualization, and its primary goal is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means.
Last week I spent time with one of my former students, Sam Batterman. Sam is a data visualization evangelist at Microsoft. He is has been working with health care companies to help them make huge decisions about the future of our health care system through the use of data visualization techniques . An interesting side note is that Sam’s new sci-fi novel (WayBack) is the result of his realization that no matter how much data you have to visualize, your pre-suppositions have a huge impact on your interpretation.
I just ran across a very fun application of data visualization that I think everyone can understand. It deals with word frequency analysis – a fancy term for “how many times each word occurs within a body of text.” I give computer science students an assignment to build a program that reads a large text file of words and then reports how many times each word occurs. Well, after finding this DV application, I think I’ll be modifying the assignment!
Here are couple examples of this technique taken from the word frequency dv website. These were generated from various sources of text – a computer science class and my personal blog space.
In the past, the key to making good decisions is to have good information. But if you have so much information that you can’t absorb it then you will likely not be able to make good decisions.
Original posting: This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2009 at http://woosters.org/dan/?p=525
