Visualizations: To Infinity and Beyond!

Visualizations: To Infinity and Beyond!

Data and information can no longer be tossed to the wayside, packaged and bundled by statisticians and logistic specialists for experts to view and for the commoner to look at and immediately shove the image out of his or her memory retention without any contextual analysis.  As history suggests (Friendly, 2006), data has been used throughout time to create visuals that provide the reader a creative and striking way to represent data for the unaided eye to create and draw conclusions. 

Framework for Visulizations

Friendly (2006) suggests in his Milestones Project that technological innovations and advancements have paralleled new ways to constructing visuals in a representational format.  With the recent burgeoning and emphasis in the handheld and user-friendly era of computers and now tablets, creating visualizations can be as easy as downloading an app and learning how to use the program. 

However, Dragga and Voss (2001) show how one can get caught up in visualizing data for simply the sake of creating a picture with facts and figures.  They show the inhumanity of many visualizations and how they can leave out the humanistic perspective.  One must try to create a visual where the words tell “what can happen” and the graph can tell “how often” the event can or did happen.  When creating a visualization, the creator should keep in mind the audience he or she is creating the visual for and cater to this audience and their sentiments.  Touching and playing on someone’s preferences, ideals, and world view will automatically induce the human intrinsic characteristic of curiosity.  Hence, sparking a reader’s curiosity by thoughtful imagination will lead to the reader themselves to take a whole new look and approach the visual in an entirely new manner.  The visual will become layered instead of ephemeral and 2-D as when one simply looks at a pie chart as the author’s so depict in their analysis.

Once a person who wants to create a visual with relevant data decides that the visual must connect on a humanistic level to create deep and contextual meaning for the audience, he or she must be able to construct a process that allows for the creation of an effective and striking visual.  Shapiro (2010) outlines this process in his article on beautiful visualizations.  He places emphasis on the fact that every visualization should tell a story.  Without a story behind or seen through the image, one cannot take away any lasting and memorable impression or viewpoint the creator was intending to convey through the visualization itself.  The process must have a defining question that motivates the creator to answer through the visual representation itself.  This must happen because as soon as a reader looks at a specific visual, the immediate question ones ask themselves is, “What am I supposed to take from this?”  Creating and shaping a visual around such a question will keep a reference point for the creator to look back and keep his creation in line with when going about the process. 

Furthering the question “What am I supposed to take from this?,” Segaran (2009) focuses on visuals that use geography to create meaning.  He used the example of the British effort to use geography to map out their country through pictures sent in from citizens around the country to literally map out the whole country through such pictures.  I think this idea is amazing.  It allows everyone, the common man, to become involved in memorable and lasting project that anyone can immediately access and say “Wow, I’ve been there!”  Through this collective effort and the compilation of such data through a conceptual visualization, a story is created that is stimulating and draws from everyone’s unique and individualized perspective.  A project using people’s ideas and representations through pictures could be used for any classroom within the Social Studies framework. 

Finally, when creating a visualization, one certainly wants to create a visual that is deemed “beautiful.”  Illinsky (2010) lays out a criterion that rests on four main points.  For a visual to be accepted into the category of beautiful, it must be aesthetically pleasing.  This means using appropriate elements to guide the reader in communicating meaning, revealing relationships, and highlighting conclusions.  Secondly, the image must be novel and provide a fresh look that sparks the viewer’s latent curiosity.  Thirdly, the visual must be informative.  That is, the visual must convey meaning with simplicity and use a context that allows the viewer to say, “I get it!”  Finally, the representational image must be efficient.  Without efficiency in the visual, the reader may have a difficult time engaging the data and gaining the perspective that the creator intended.

Implications

When viewing visualizations, especially in a social studies framework, the teacher must be aware as to who has created the visual and the meaning that person wanted the viewer to engage in.  For one, the image may present a specific bias of the information and discriminate certain data that could possibly be used to create a wholly different visual with obviously different meaning.  The teacher will want to teach the students, just as SCIM-C does, to constantly question and evaluate the visual and derive their own meaning from it and not just accept what the author is trying to say.  This will allow further discussion upon the visual itself and students can create their own views and alternatives to the visual itself.

Motivation Behind the Money

I wanted to focus on a visualization that had profound effects on me.  McCandless (2010) created a representation visual using data from various media news outlets showing the “motivation behind the money.”  I found this creation to qualify as “beautiful” in accordance with Illinsky’s (2010) criterion.  The visual was aesthetically pleasing, novel, informative, and efficient.  I loved how this one-page image allowed me to sit at my computer and think about all the different motivations for spending money.  I really was startled at the amount of money our own government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially after seeing it’s weight transcribed so large in comparison with the other boxes.  I realized if just a percentage of money was given to faltering youth programs and others educational structures that are so critical to our nation’s progress and future as a global structure, we could help so many with just a chip off the block.  Wow! This visual certainly gave me perspective.  Even though some would say the visual was biased, the visual itself struck my curiosity and gave me the incentive to start looking at other sources to gather data on our war chest in relation to other national expenditures.

Addendum

Using Geograph in the Classroom

Using the chapter concerning the Geograph program in the source entitled Beautiful Data by Segaran (2009) would be a great way to show how visuals can create meaning in a social studies classroom context. The Geograph concept as stated in the former section is a way to use pictures and images taken by people to construct an archive that is maps the geography of Britain is an entirely novel way. I would show the Geograph project to my students via the projector as an introduction and ask my students how do they think this technology can apply to our own study of social studies. I would hope one my students would ask if they could bring their own pictures in to create a visual. Once that happens, I would incorporate my planned lesson on having the students bring their own pictures in to class. The activity would align with people, places, and things and also incorporate using technology in the classroom to create student meaning and critical thinking. Students would bring in 3 pictures of places a memorable had visited, their own domicile or somewhere they think of as “home,” and a place that they want to visit in the future. Then as a class, we could create three different archives with transitions and effects that take the viewer from Memorable Places to Home is Where the Heart Is and to Future Memories. Students would take part in cropping pictures, creating text to describe the places aligning with historical references, and structuring the format of the Geograph visualization. Then, after the initial work is completed, the class could create a unique and personal class website with public availability that parents, peers, and others could see. To formally assess the class, the students would have for one to bring in three pictures to receive credit for that part of the assignment. Additionally, as the students could pick certain “jobs” such as scribe, cropper, investigator, formatter, etc., credit would be given if students completed their jobs. Without each individual’s completion of the task they pick, the creation would not be complete. Each student would thus take on a responsibility that would have a proportional responsibility to the class’ creation and completion the project itself. Since this is a class project, the students at the end of the lesson would take part in a socratic seminar that would be in-class and also available in a web forum so they could comment on the process and discuss benefits/implications/likes/dislikes/what could have been done better/etc. Students who take part in the discussion would receive credit for this final portion of the assignment.