Information Visualization for Discovery and Analysis
Stephen Few
Founder & Principal
Perceptual Edge
We live in a data-rich world. You’ve heard this before, but what you probably haven’t heard is that we stand upon a vast shoreline of information, fashionably dressed in the latest diver’s gear and equipped with the slickest tools and gadgets, but have nary a clue what to do. Before we know it, we’re drowning within a stone’s throw of the shore, flailing about and wondering what went so wrong.
We spend billions of dollars every year on Information Technology (IT) in an effort to create meaningful and actionable information, only to have the data collect in murky pools that grow ever larger yet more stagnant by the day. In the last decade we’ve seen tremendous progress in the technologies that allow us to collect, store, and access data, but we’ve largely ignored the key component in this data sense-making system: the human brain. While concentrating on the technology, we’ve forgotten the human skills that are needed to make sense of the data. Computers cannot make sense of data: only people can.
The mechanics of data analysis can take various forms, but information visualization stands alone in its ability to provide a simple yet illuminating window through which data can be seen and understood. Information visualization can simultaneously reveal the big picture and the details, and does so in a way that is accessible to a broad audience, for it relies not on a special language but on something all but a few are able to do: to see.
Vision provides more information than all the other senses combined, not only in terms of sheer volume and speed but also in subtlety. By encoding quantitative business information in visual form, our ability to think about it is dramatically extended. When data is visualized effectively and suddenly, there is what Joseph Berkson called an “interocular traumatic impact”: a conclusion that hits us between the eyes.
Key Points of Value
Mr. Few identified the following books as landmark works in Information Visualization:
Readings in Information Visualization, First Edition : Using Vision to Think
by Stuart K. Card, Jock Mackinlay, annd Ben Shneiderman.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
by Edward Tufte
Comments (2)
Sonya Edwards said
at 10:32 am on Apr 28, 2006
Loved this presentation. Very relevant as we start to think about how we use all this data.
Ryan Day said
at 10:59 am on May 1, 2006
I agree, Stephen Few does some great work in this area. I loved his opening quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric
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