Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Franco thinks about “distant reading,” which means trying to get a
sense of what someone's talking about without reading line by line.
This leads to
PCA-esque
thinking, a kind of dimension reduction of
novels (recall we studied dimension reduction techniques in
Chap‐
ter 8
).
Mark holds this up as a cool example of how ideally, data science in‐
tegrates the ways that experts in various fields already figure stuff out.
In other words, we don't just go into their backyards and play; maybe
instead we go in and watch
them
play, and then formalize and inform
their process with our own bells and whistles. In this way they can
teach us new games, games that actually expand our fundamental
conceptions of data and the approaches we need to analyze them.
A Sample of Data Visualization Projects
Here are some of Mark's favorite visualization projects, and for each
one he asks us: is this your idea of data visualization? What's data?
Figure 9-1
is a projection onto a power plant's steam cloud. The size
of the green projection corresponds to the amount of energy the city
is using.
Figure 9-1.
Nuage Vert by Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen
