Rise of Data Visualisation in 2010

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain

Quote by Hans Christian Von Baeyer

We live in an age increasingly defined by the ubiquity of information.  Although, as technology allows us to further integrate our digital and real worlds, this ‘relentless drizzle’ begins to feel more torrential.  Data Visualisation (#dataviz) is an emerging field that focuses on the traces left by us splashing, running and jumping through this ‘invisible, impalpable electric rain’.  By beginning to visualise the data trail from the traces we make, we start to illustrate and map this exciting new world, in exciting new ways.

I attended a talk a few months ago put on by Made by Many (@madebymany) and delivered by Manuel Lima (@mslima) on the growing phenomenon of visualising data from the online world.  It was a representation of his TED Global 2009 talk ‘Network Visualisations in an Age of Interconnectedness’.  The talk caused a lot of debate and quickly established itself as vibrant topic on the blogs and twitter feeds of London’s planners, strategists and digitally tuned in.  This trend raises a lot of questions, particularly for the research community, and there is a lot of writing and debate going on around this area. Something I intend to address in a future post.  But one key question that arose for me was how this trend was likely to manifest itself and impact the general online public’s world.  Using Manuel’s reason for growth I have set out where I think we are likely to see Data Viz impacting on the everyday net use in 2010.

So what does Data Viz mean for the general online population?

Firstly, the Capacity to store information is growing rapidly.  This means we will soon all have the capacity to hold vast oceans of content, but also huge archives of our digital biography – where, when and what we did online.  Some of this might be exciting determiners of our identity (e.g. what music we listened to that month) and thus information we want to access and show to create conversation and affirm who we are. Other stuff will be more mundane (e.g. websites visited per day).  In digitally advanced societies and communities this will create questions such as, what is important for me to know? What do I want to show to other people? And what is unimportant or is best hidden?  Although already evident (e.g. tag clouds) the uptake of Data Viz to use these vast oceans of personal data in order to create engaging illustrations of who we are and what we do is growing.  GPS enabled features, and games like FourSquare, on newer Smart Phones will again allow us to archive and map our data of the places and spaces we inhabit – adding an interesting geo-dimension to this identity creation. I think it is fair to say Data Viz will be an increasingly important tool to create engaging identity markers of who we are.

Secondly, another important reason for this trends growth is an increased take up and communication on Social Networks, allowing exciting illustrations of the networks (people, topics of interest, conversations, pictures, videos etc) that make up a large element of our social worlds.  For researchers both commercial and academic this has obvious benefits, but for general netizens visualising communications data from social networks will become and increasingly important field.  For example, rather than have huge linear alphabetically organised banks of friends in their Facebook, email or twitter contacts (most of which lay dormant) by visualising data created by communication between friends, Data Viz will be able to feed into more intuitive structuring of social networks.  This will allow us better see and navigate the worlds in which we really exist.  I believe this will again form and underpin a set of visual markers of our online social identities, both in how we view and navigate these worlds, and how our online self is represented to others.

Lastly, the underpinning mechanics of this Data Viz trend are progressing quickly.  As Data becomes more open and we a see a democratisation of tools with which to make simple visualisations, we are already seeing Data Viz being utilised in Mainstream media and adopted by the general public (eg. Flickr clouds, Guardian and NY Times editorials).  This is creating what Manuel refers to as vernacular visualisations which are meeting the demand for more engaging and insightful visualisations of who we are, and how we see ourselves.  I would suggest we will begin to see increased uptake in simple, easy to use, visualisation apps on online profiles.

In short I see a few key cultural trends in the general online population’s adoption of Data Viz in 2010.

• Data Viz will act like a mirror – as our lives and our identities become increasingly mediated online, Data Viz will become more important as it allows us to understand and view our online self in exciting and attractive ways.
• Data Viz will begin to inform more intuitive user interfaces. i.e. much like Genius on ITunes or Amazon recommendations, information we create in the navigation of our content will form cognitive maps of how we access, navigate and use content, and thus the visualisations be able to inform how we archive and organise content by organising it intuitively based on our usage patterns.
• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly,  Data Viz allows us to show others and tell stories about ourselves. As digital replaces the ‘real’, Data Viz will replace the bookshelf, CD rack or DVD collection.  It will tell others who we are, and so the bedroom wall becomes a set of visualisations on our Facebook page or other personal online spaces.

This post was written by Greg Wells, Flamingo London

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 7:17 pm. It is filed under Europe, Image, Internet, Technology and tagged with data visualisation, featured, identity, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.