Dear Data Blog #1
For my Dear Data visualization, I decided to do how many times I drank water in a day. I started tracking my data on my phone’s Notes app. As I did, I figured out what adjustments to make and what other information I wanted to include. For example, I thought I might want to put how much total water I had drank in the day, so I began tracking the amount left at midnight.
To make the visual, I drew a water droplet shape and cut it out so I could have a consistent shape. I made a larger one as well but after testing on a scrap piece of paper, I thought the smaller one fit better.
Adding every hour in the day seemed like it would be too much and overcrowd the visual. Instead, I added marks to each drop that represented the major times on a clock - 12, 3, 6, and 9.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go through with my “amount of water” idea but as I was getting ready to label the times, I questioned why I had lines on both sides. I played around with some sketches and decided to make the right side the times and the left side the amount of water.
I took some markers and assigned a color to each day then used those colors to approximately mark when I had drank water and refilled the bottle.
In the end, I think the visual came out pretty well. Although, I think the small size and the chunking of time into larger intervals meant it wasn’t as easy to see the spread of times. It still works to give a general idea of when I drank water but maybe a slightly more detailed or bigger visual would have been better.
The Beauty of Data Visualization
This TED talk by David McCandless was an interesting presentation on the way we see and understand data. He encapsulates the power of data visualization when he says, “The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern. It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. It's the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other” (McCandless 10:09).
I think the core takeaway is the importance of relativity and perspective when it comes to visualizing data. Information does not exist in a vacuum and it is only by understanding its relation to other factors and pieces of data that we can truly see its significance and place in the world. McCandless says, “So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don't give you the whole picture. They're not as true as they could be. We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective” (McCandless 11:55).
