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Studies / Practices

Data is exploding. According to Eric Schmidt from Google, we produce five exabytes of data every two days. This is the same amount of data that was amassed from the beginning of civilization until 2003. Today, we create more than 204 million email messages, over 4 million Google search queries, 48 hours of new YouTube videos, 684,000 bits of content shared on Facebook, 100,000+ tweets and $272,000 is spent on e-commerce every minute of every day. IDC(International Data Corporation) now forecasts that we will generate 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020. As you can see, there is no doubt of the correlation between the acceleration of data, and the growing use of new digital devices and ever evolving world in which we live. So then, what can we do with this massive amount of data? Maybe we could see how the weather has changed over the last 10 years. Perhaps we could depict how headlines in the news varies from region to region. People visualize data for different purposes. Some people visualize it to see patterns. Others do so because they want to see large quantities of data at once, or look for answers to various questions. I wondered what the value in seeking data was. Why would we visualize it? What could we obtain? What would be the true benefit of “seeing” data? Awareness and changes As a data visualizer and artist, I believe that data is powerful and can raise our levels of awareness. Being able to see and notice things which we were previously oblivious to, we are left with an impact that can lead to positive behavioral changes. These changes are a result of the self-reflection that was influenced by seeing the data. Frame the world not only through your perspective, but others as well Confirmation bias, also called my side bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses. When we see data, we should recognize how we project data and how others do as well. We should consider other perspectives equally with ours. This experience will help hold us accountable to find solutions to the problems in our societies. Reducing mistakes, better understanding Our cognitive skills are complex because emotions affect how we process information. We, as human beings, have a tendency of remembering things the way we want. While we cannot change the past, with a better understanding of what went wrong through data, we can avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. The visualization of data will help us to do this.