Data is usually made of numbers. Information is gathered, quantified, measured, categorized. In the digital age even sensory input is converted to hard numbers. A picture is a matrix of numerical color values, a sound is a matrix of frequency and amplitude samples converted to numbers.  But, how is data visualized?

 

Data visualization is not a new thing. Humans have been doing it for centuries via maps, bar charts, pie charts, histograms and scatter plots. What has changed is the quantity of data that one attempts to consume and the technology available to process all that data. Big Data has become a part of popular culture, the topic of radio and TV chat shows and PBS specials as well as an academic field with journals and conferences. The primary purpose of data visualization is to make the meaning of data, big or small, apparent.

At its best data visualization is not just eye candy; a dressing up of data for public display. Rather it is an essential part of the process of understanding data. Imagine a photograph as data. The grid of numbers is almost meaningless as such. Certainly the meaning of the resulting image is not apparent in the numbers. Only through a process of visualization does the actual meaning of the data become apparent.  This paper will explore these and related issues.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of web-based data visualization with a sampling of types of visualization and outline of the tools and processed used to create them.​