Stupid Question 173: What is information visualization?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting the driven students in Norrkoping studying media technology. I held a session at MTD2013 and was very impressed at how well put together the event was, and how they took care of me and everybody else.- Thank you for the company and the photo Johan :)

Me at MTD :)

I had many good conversations, with sponsors such as Dice and the students. Many of the students there study information visualization, and to be honest- I wasn’t quite sure what that was. Of course I could make a pretty good guess, but why not look it up?

I asked the students and they described it as ‘showing data in a way that humans can easily understand, and in a way that makes sense’. I watched a session by a young woman showing her graduation project in information visualization, and she had put together a beautiful dashboard that showed blog statistics data, and ways to compare and analyze data. What hit me, is that this is really a science and I was quite impressed with the ways she allowed the user to view and analyze otherwise boring data.

Let’s have a closer look at this.

Information is basically data (‘Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction’), and visualization is a mental model. Together they should give the user a mental image or model, based on information that is derived from data in a comprehensible way- and in a way that makes sense for the intended user and the data.

The whole thing has three important parts, representation, presentation and interaction- and how we best go about it depends greatly on the data domain and the relevant human characteristics. So there is a lot to think about, which results in a wide range of tools we as developers can use. Telerik (where I work as a technical evangelist) has several tools and components for that- such as the charting controls I used in the step by step guide, and Telerik Reporting- more or less you’ll find some sort of information visualization integrated in most of our products and I’m sure most people have used some sort of tool at some point. I remember when we studied statistics at university how easy it was to manipulate how the data was interpreted by visualizing the information in a different way. Rather scary!

I’m actually really keen on leaning more about information visualization, so expect more about that in upcoming posts, I ordered some books on the subject from amazon :)

Stupid Question 173: What is information visualization?

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