Data Visualisation, is it art to you?

When analysing the interest in posts here on CIL, one of the topics which perennially gets more visitors than others is data visualisation.

So, in order to listen to our readers, here’s another round-up of recent Data Viz resources that are hopefully helpful to you or your team.

Encouraging the creative side of data visualisation, Teradata recently exhibited 20 visualisations at the “Art of Analytics” exhibition within their conference in Amsterdam. Here’s an interesting post on their site reflecting on the value of analytics visualisations as art work:

http://blogs.teradata.com/international/creative-data-scientist-worth

Going deeper into the idea of analysts or data visualisers as creative artists, Visual Loop published a fascinating interview with Giorgia Lupi co-founder of Accurat. Very much in the same spirit as Edward Tufte, her architectural expertise shines through in the quality of thinking & work shared here. Some useful reflections on the risk of over-simplification as well:

Talking with… Giorgia Lupi

After graduating in Architecture at Ferrara University, in 2006, the professional life of Giorgia Lupi took a decisive turn towards the fields of information design and data visualization. Almost 10 years have passed, and looking back to what took place ever since, we, information visualization consumers and practitioners, can only thank her for that decision, […]

For those wanting to go deeper with this topic and progress to more sophisticated visualisation tools, Vega 2.0 was released this week. This tool is described as a “visualisation grammar”, a declarative (rather than procedural) format for creating & saving interactive visualisations. If you have the technical skills for the coding, you can describe your data visualisations in JSON format and then generate your interactive visualisation in a range of formats including HTML5. There’s also a helpful tutorial to get you started:

A Visualization Grammar

Vega – A Visualization Grammar. Vega is a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format, and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.

I hope you found those useful and interesting. There are some truly beautiful examples of effective data visualisations within those posts. Is it art? I don’t know, but what surely matters more is does it convey meaning & grab the attention of the reader (which can be all you need to achieve in business).

Are you managing to use data visualisations to grab the attention of your leaders or infect your internal culture with key customer messages? Please do share your stories or indeed your visualisations.