Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Artfully visualizing our humanity

LINK

In this TED Talk, Aaron Koblin speaks about how we can use the ever-expanding amounts of data that is collected to create visualizations that will humanize the otherwise cold and stale numbers and statistics. Koblin is an artist that takes data and creates art out of them. In one of his works, he takes airplane flight data and maps how and when flights coming from the United States occur. It is a sleek and easy to understand design, and is breathtaking to see how many flights occur each day in America.

His work for the most part does not apply to our overall InfoVis themes in class, but it is a fresh way at interpreting data. With the Internet being the way it is today, people are being brought together in a way that encourages a completing difficult conceptual projects that is motivated purely by being part of a fun, giving, and interactive community. For example, in one of Koblin's works, "The Johnny Cash Project," fans of Cash were given the opportunity to draw one frame for a Cash music video, where each frame from the thousands of fans would be sequenced together to create a unique animation. How this relates to InfoVis is the amount of data each frame retains. As each frame is created online via a flash drawing application, it records the exact keystrokes it takes for a user to create the frame. Other community members can view each frame that they desire to see how the frame was created and other pieces of information.

What Koblin is doing is creating a humanized way to interpret data. Because at the end of the day, while science and numbers is what advances and protects humanity, without innovation and creativity, there is no humanity.

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