Information Is Beautiful

Information might seem unwieldy, ugly, sterile and unreadable if there's tons of it and we don't know how to tackle it. Data crunching is a hard, arduous task and so is data mining. While that might be true, it also might be true that they are labours that are becoming increasingly important as technology becomes more powerful and all that jingodingo. So, what can we do with cumbersome spreadsheets and gigabytes of 'raw data'? We can either sift through it and try to represent it in the old-fashioned ways or try to hook up our visual interest, making it visually understandable and therefore something we can relate to on a more primal level. We need to since there's just so much information out there and it keeps multiplying at exponential rates (for more about this, an article called Jumping Jesus sheds more light).

Here we have David McCandless (from the site Information is Beautiful), talking to us about his passion of data, and how to make it actually fun:



Another approach he hasn't touched in the video is a bit more artistic; Seed Magazine has a slideshow called ''The Age of Impossible Numbers''. Can you guess how many containers pass through American ports every 12 hours? You might be really surprised by the answer, and how it looks!