The Power of Data Visualization
Data visualization is the process of organizing data - often rather complex data - into visual terms that are easier for us to understand.
Instead of a table with numbers, for example, you might have an interactive graph (Excel’s graphing option would be a very simplified example of this).
But data visualization doesn’t always have to be a graph, and there’s a helluva lot of different ways information can be presented.
Data visualization can be used in a wide of formats that allow huge amounts of raw data to be simplified in a way that’s it’s understandable to the human brain. It can be used to explain anything as mundane as How Louis CK Tells a Joke to A Guide to Who Is Fighting Whom In Syria.
While I highly recommend you look up what’s out there, I should probably warn you that looking up data visualizations is kind of like looking up “just that one song” on YouTube - next thing you know it’s been three hours, you’re on the weird part of the internet, and you’re not quite sure how you got there.
In case you’re wary of falling into the (admittedly fascinating) black hole that is data visualization google searching, I gathered a bunch of examples in relation to Trump below:
The Guardian decided to keep a tally/scoreboard you can check in periodically to see how it’s changed.
The Washington Post looked at what Trump did during his first 744 hours (31 days) in office, keeping it simple with an old classic: the pie chart.
FiveThirtyEight came up with a nifty app where you can see how each member of congress has voted. If you’re a sports fan, this might be a fun app to check out, as their stats are rated much like player’s stats.
ProPublica’s made an interactive database which allows users to look at detailed data on lawmakers’ actions in Congress.
A blog by The Washington Post, called “The Fix”, developed a tweet fact-checker extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox
Nerdwriter1, a channel on YouTube, does great data visualization, and has done some work on Trump as well, such as How Trump Answers a Question and How (and Why) Trump Tweets.
And best for last: Vax, a free game explaining herd immunity and why vaccination is important not only on an individual level but also for society as a whole (especially for people whose immune systems are compromised, such as cancer patients and HIV+ individuals).
When done right, data visualization can help us to anchor abstract data on the firmer ground of concrete references, bringing it closer to the kind of information our brains evolved to understand more easily. Good to remember: image isn’t only what meets the eye. Imagery can also be a built-in feature of language, where imagined scenes and characters are “projected” right onto your brain’s internal screen, as vividly as (or more vividly than) the best collection of pixels on your monitor.
Can we also use this feature—this different kind of visualization—to help translate data into meaning? We certainly can. But that’s a subject for another post.