Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 51

Blue dots are locations where people tweeted, red dots represent places where
people took Flickr photos, and white dots represent where people did both.
So you can see where people usually tweet (say something) or take a picture
(see something). It's a simple idea with great execution and beautiful results.

From an even wider point of view—from space—NASA uses satellite data to
monitor activity on Earth. For example, Figure 2-7 is a snapshot from an ani-
mation that shows components of the water cycle: evaporation, water vapor,
and precipitation. The data feeds into atmospheric models, which allows you
to see significant changes over time for the planet.

Perpetual Ocean , also by NASA, uses similar data and models to estimate ocean
currents, as shown in Figure 2-8. It might remind you of Vincent van Gogh's
painting The Starry Night .

Note: See also the animated world map from
NASA that shows a decade of fires:
http://datafl.ws/2bb.

How amazing is that? Large amounts of data make that
possible. Of course, new data types in growing volumes
demands new tools to explore beyond pen and paper.

TOOLS

The introduction of computers changed how you can analyze and explore data.
You can make a lot of charts in a few seconds, view data from many angles,
and sift through more complex datasets than those who had to chart man-
ually. There are also more data exploration tools than ever before. Microsoft
Excel is still the software of choice in many offices, which can work for a lot
of jobs, but the methods that people want to use and the depth they want
to explore is changing.

Tableau Software is one of the more popular desktop programs that enables
you to visually analyze your data. Everything is done via a click interface, so no
programming skills are required, and it can handle a healthy amount of data at
once, so you're free to roam. Tableau Public enables you to build visualization
dashboards and share them online.

There's also desktop software to visualize specific types of data. For example,
ImagePlot by Software Studies Lab at California Institute for Telecommunication
and Information Technology (Calit2) enables you to explore images. You can
do this with other software, but ImagePlot specializes in handling millions of
images at once and can place them in a two-dimensional space to analyze
aspects of a collection, such as color or volume.