The Art of Data Visualization

          The general idea of this video was Data Visualization, but it was broken down into individual parts throughout the video. The first quote that caught my attention was, "visualizations are a by product of the truth and goodness of the information." This means that the root to all the images and visualizations in the world are truthful facts and valid information. If the data is bad and not valid, then it is going to be difficult to make an image that people can understand and trust. This plays of another idea that was presented: the history of visualization data is a history of science. Science was used to come up with the data. If there was no data then there couldn't be any visualizations to go along with it. I agree with this statement because you can always make visualizations, but if they are not based off facts or data than the viewer has no content to go with the image. Another major aspect I found interesting was that these visualizations are built in a way that our sub-conscious brain activity can make split decisions off of them. Even though we don't know it, we interpret images in a certain way before we can even form words about them. Having linear patterns in these visualizations makes our decision making easier and faster so we can process more information in a shorter period of time. The quote that I thought was most powerful in the video was, "See to learn not to confirm." What this means is that you should look at data visualizations and learn new things, not confirm things you already know.  Maps, trends and pie charts are just a few examples of data visualization that people use. We do not think of these things as data but all three of them help us interpret a large amount of information with ease. There is so much data in the world that data visualizations help us learn new things in every day life whether we realize it or not.
          Data visualizations are similar to art because there is information behind them that drives the image. In art, it is often an emotion, a story or history. In data visualizations, it is obviously data. Even though art and data visualizations don't look the same on the surface, they are much more alike than you think.