Data Visualization Techniques – For the Masses

 Data by itself is often uninteresting – especially massive amounts of it. Sophisticated applications alongside powerful databases are often necessary to analyze the data and display it in comprehendible formats.

The New York Times reports in “Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data” of a website that is now available to help create and share visuals of data.

The article notes, “At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (http://www.many-eyes.com/), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.”

Why data visualization? The article sums it up, “Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. But sometimes it’s like driving with your eyes closed. With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you— for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.”

Try wheeling your latest data set over to this website –you might uncover something significant!

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