The Social Life of Visual Data

Source: Social Visualization, Lecture Slides, Martin Wattenberg, IBM

I've been reflecting on the Nancy White's SpiderGram activity that helps you visualize the orientation of your community as a prelude to selecting the right online collaboration tool.   As technology steward for an online community of practice or facilitator of a group that wants to work together online, it is valuable to do this exercise to help you get a better understanding.  But, it's also valuable to do as a group exercise to spark discussion and reflection.

By chance this morning, I discovered the blog of my one twitter followers, Sumitroy001 who works with ngos and social media in India.   I landed on the syllabus for a course in data visualization at Harvard University.   The course description:

The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. We must increasingly rely on computational approaches to generate abstractions that help us to gain insights into large collections of data. The field of visualization seeks to answer questions about science and humanity by developing methods that transform data into meaningful, perceptually intuitive representations. Good visualizations not only present a visual interpretation of data, but do so by improving comprehension, communication, and decision making.

The goal of this course is to expose students to visualization methods and techniques that increase the understanding of complex data. The course will cover how the human visual system processes and perceives images, good design practices for visualization, tools for visualization of data from a variety of fields, and programming of interactive visualization systems. The course is targeted both towards students interested in using visualization in their own work, and students interested in building better visualization tools and systems.

As the web becomes more social, data visualization and social data visualization skills will become more necessary to help us make meaning out of complexity.   One of the lectures in this course was on the topic of Social Visualization and delivered by Martin Wattenberg from IBM.  ( Many Eyes is one of his projects at IBM).  

In his lecture, he visually defines data visualization, classic social visualization, and social data exploration. 

Anyway, it is making me wonder how, if at all, you are using social data visualizations to analyze your nonprofit's social network or social media activity? 

Comments

[Mateo Gutierrez]

This concept of social data visualization sounds very interesting. I work with online communities as a consultant and always tell my clients to LISTEN to their communities and find out what has the greatest value to them and then build tools to make the experience better/easier for them. This sounds something like what you are talking about. I'd love to learn more if you have any articles/links you could shoot my direction.
Thank you.

[mikeysames]

This is the data visualization that I created for tying my social networks together. http://techhermit.blogspot.com/2009/03/social-media-schematic.html
I felt like I needed a visual to just use this one tool.
Strategically, it doesn't make sense, but I thought it might fit in as an example of the visualization I needed.

[Nancy White]

If you are a visualization junkie, here are a few tags... http://delicious.com/choconancy/visual_thinking