Photo Shooting Social Entities

A short talk about data and data-visualization made at BitNorth in 2008

Transcript

1. Photo­shooting social entities with data visualization Sébastien Pierre, Datalicious Inc. @BitNorth, Sept. 2008 www.datalicious.ca | www.bitnorth.com
2. The Context
3. 3 Information Society We ...live in a torrent of information ...feed it directly: email, forums, blogs, IM ...or indirectly: server logs, search queries ...the mass of raw data is growing everyday
4. Pre­Information Era [1] A couple of centuries ago... Data was scarce, expensive to collect, to store and process So we kept it simple, only handled a couple of factors Information was shared only amongst a selected few...
5. Pre­Information Era [2] then... Gutenberg helped us store more Maths and stats helped us process more We could handle more factors, more data ...and information started to flow
6. Fast­ Forward now... Google tells you never to delete your emails Facebook invites you to tell who your friends are Twitter makes you share what you do and how you feel ... we are sharing a lot of personal information !
7. Social data Produced by humans, collected by computers updated in realtime, evolving every day reflecting the interactions between us ...we used to collect data on our environment, now we're collecting data on us
8. The forms of social data
9. User centric Twitter­Browser – Twitter network visualization Neuroproductions (2008) people­centric small scale
10. Community wide Vizster – Friendster network visualization Jeffrey Heer, Dana Boyd (2005) community­wide large scale
11. Some links could be made We are living entities We produce data ... is this data alive too ?
12. Taking it one step further If crowds were living organisms... We would be their living cells and data would be its byproduct ... and we would have discovered a new lifeform !
13. The problem is We're dealing with (social) things we can't see... We're understanding them from our own experience and theorization We have mental pictures of them, but we never get a chance to see them for real... ... data visualization can give us eyes to see
14. On data visualization
15. Theory vs practice Managing the 21st century organization – An IT Department Valdis Krebs, OrgNet (2007)
16. Lesson 1 Data visualization can improve our understanding by seeing things we don't usually see
17. problem: pictures are not enough A typical alligator
18. the life of data Social entities... evolve : people join, people leave, people change they have dynamic patterns resulting from the complex interactions of individuals ... we need to see how they react and change
19. Data in action GapMinder – TED Talk 2005 Hans Rosling (www.gapminder.org) ­ watch it from 4:15s
20. Lesson 2 Animations can reveal complex interaction schemes by giving life to data
21. problem: watching is not enough
22. We need to manipulate things ! Like scientists in a lab... we need to see things in slow­motion we need to peel the layers and see what is under the hood we need to isolate specific things ... we need tools to operate on data
23. Lesson 3 Interaction help us turn data into a gold mine of new information by giving us tools to dig it up
24. Summary Data visualization with animation and interactivity is the future !
25. The end Thank you ! www.datalicious.ca sebastien@datalicious.ca