Data visualisation is now a mass medium with tons of followers and recognition. From the view of graphic designers, data visualisation is an essential part of the communication process.
Designers engage with the aesthetics, forms and the politics of data presentation from molecular to stelar from deeply personal to global.
What is data?
Data is the lowest level of abstraction, it is documentation in its rawest form and doesn’t have a meaning, for data to become information it needs to be interpreted and take on a meaning.
What is data visualisations?
It is information that has been abstracted in some schematic form including attributes or variables for the units of information, and involves the creation, study and representation of data. The primary goal of a visualisation is to communicate information clearly and sufficiently from using statistical graphs, plots and information graphics.
Whats the difference between information graphics and data visualisation?
An infographic may show the information visually but not in detail, it is vacant of the statistics, data and the research that was recored that lead to the end result.
Data visualisation shows all the information and tells us more about the subject in a more accessible and understandable way making the more complex data easer to analyse and learn from.
Reflection
This lecture gave me insight on what data is, which is basically, the rawest form of documentation that typically has no meaning until a question or a pattern can be found to form a story. This also gave me understanding on the difference of infographics and data visualisations which is that infographics don’t contain as much information to which they can’t form multiple views on the topic, when in a data visualisation it will give the reader more scope on the subject and make large data sets easier to understand.
Data Visualisation 