Data Visualization

• What tools did you try?

I tried visual.ly, Many Eyes and Tagxedo.

• What are you representing in the visualization you created?

With Many Eyes I used a data set they had about what people do with the internet to create a bubble chart. With Tagxedo I put in my blog url to create a word cloud in the shape of an apple. My favorite tool was visual.ly. I did the resume thing which was really cool and then I did the life of a hash tag and dropped in the #maet hashtag.

• What questions or "ah-ha" moments arise when thinking about representation?

I really thought about initial appeal and attraction. My Fiancé's psychology professor told him there is no proof that people have different learning styles, e.g. visual learners. I disagree to some extent. There may not be proof that people learn better a certain way but I know from experience that if something is drab and unappealing the learner will not pick it up. It will not spark their interest. I think that representing data in ways other than your standard bar graphs and pie charts is an amazing idea. I think one has to be careful about where and what they are representing, but overall I find data visualizations like this very exciting.