TEDTalks: David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization

The Huffington Post points us to a fun TED talk from David McCandless about new ways to mash up and merge data into fun and useful visualizations, and slyly throws in a plug for his book The Visual Miscellaneum.

McCandless’ genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data — the actual graphics aren’t the real innovation here — as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). McCandless contributes a monthly big-think graphic to the Guardian’s Data Blog, and makes viral graphics for his blog Information Is Beautiful.

Just don’t forget that Beauty isn’t all that useful without proper reference.
via TEDTalks: David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.