This week I have focused my research on data visualization on renowned statistician Dr. Hans Rosling, a scientist with a great sense of responsibility by making the world better with datasets that will change people’s mindsets. May he rest in peace in heaven.
I started watching a TED talk by David McCandless, the founder of website “informationisbeautiful.net”, who mentioned the meaning for visualizing data—-compressing the overload information to reveal patterns or connections that matter. And Mr. McCandless regards Dr. Rosling as his master.
Then I found out Dr. Rosling’s talk, the one ranked as one of the top 500 TED talks, that he gave to the US State Department on the topic of developing countries’ health issues. Dr. Rosling used his animated visualizations to illustrate the changes of children’s death rate, people’s lifespan and HIV carrying rate of people living in different countries over time. Dr. Rosling was an enthusiastic scholar that cares about improving the overall health status of the world, and I greatly respect him for that. Also I have discovered this awesome website that Dr. Rosling had founded.
As people can fastly comprehend information conveyed in a picture, and as the size of data right now is so enormous, the way to use data visualization is inevitable. Just like programming is the way to communicate with computers, data visualization will become a common language and a tool, to interact efficiently with people’s mindset. For now, the resources above are enough for me to go over as a rookie visualizer, and I’ll need more knowledge in data mining, data processing and statistics. Hope that one way I can express dataset freely that will catch people’s eyes and make them ponder. And then I can proudly call myself “a data artist”.