Human beings have never had as much data as they currently have today. The interweb contains hundreds of thousands of terabytes of information. Those numbers may tell the most tech-savvy reader the story if you stop long enough to read and process them, but very few people have time or ability to do that. Statistics are flung around, used and more frequently, misused (note: I just did it. See how?)
Computer scientists have made it possible for anyone anywhere to share any amount of video, audio or text that would like, and people have responded. Yes, I want you to be thinking about YouTube right now.
Progress
Such an obvious problem has forced many attempts at solutions, and some have even been very effective. Yet none seem to be mainstream, and I’m not sure why.
Google Desktop has an add-on that allows you to view results as a similarity map. I’ve never really experimented with this feature, but then again I think I’m uninstalling Google Desktop later today, depending on when the flight that I’m on right now gets in.
The real progress, though, comes outside of Computer Science. That is, people use the new visual capabilities of our massive computing power to express things in everyday life.
Primitive Examples
Guy Kawasaki links to a visual representation of the federal budget. People hear of a trillion dollar deficit or a billion dollar bill all the time. Those numbers are very hard to comprehend for many people, but pictures, see, pictures are easy. My twin cousins each just sent me cards with pictures they drew, and although they cannot yet write, their message was instantly clear. They enjoyed when their cousin lifted them on their shoulders, especially in the backyard. Oh, and also one of them likes bunnies.
CitizenJake shares a collection of photographs that seek to examine American culture. 11,000 jet trails may sound like ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’, but we can rarely think beyond those primitive qualitative grounds. These images show us the quantitative problem, but we use qualitative observation to understand them.
Notice that so far, no new or complicated computer science is required. Since both of the examples above rely only on numbers at a given time period, you can create the images one time, therefore giving yourself as much time as it takes.
Dynamic Visualizations
Enabling interaction provides one direction to take theses static images, relating closely to an earlier post of mine. I won’t dwell on this side, since it is merely a sub-case of the user interaction problem. I will mention a tool by Google called Gapminder. The program allows to interact wit it in many ways, and you can easily see various statistics separated geographically, temporally and in many other ways.
One aspect of the avalanche of data we face every day, as yet not dealt with, is that we face it every day. For instance, let’s say Google updates its index of the internet every 6 weeks ( I think this is about right). That is fine since much of what people search for does not change from day to day. But that system would fail horribly for, say, Google News, which uses an entirely different philosophy.
Similarly, some visualization applications have used a similar approach. The most amazing one that I’ve seen is called We Feel Fine. It analyzes recent blogs, notably on social networking sites used by predominantly non-technical people, and displays relationships between feelings expressed on the blog. As crude of an approach as it may be, it gives a great picture of ways in which you might start analyzing the internet.
Other Implications
You have seen ads in which these tactics are used. Take the truth.com ads, where some large number of people all fall to the ground at the same time, representing, say, the number of people that will die today from cigarettes. Those ads have proven effective and those images stick with us, whether we’d like them to or not.
People have begun to realize that numbers are no longer sufficient, and as sad as that may or may not be, people will always respond more passionately to images, even if those images are representing the same exact fact.
Post a Comment