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Data visualization has finally gone viral, says guest columnist UC Berkeley e-learning librarian Char Booth, and we have Twitter to thank

Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at University of California, Berkeley -- Library Journal, 01/07/2010

Steven Bell, From the Bell Tower Sorry to disappoint, but this year-end review column is not about how Twitter "conquered the world in 2009." To be sure, Twitter played its part as the emerging technology darling of 2009, and it would be hard to overlook the 140-character behemoth’s startlingly rapid influence on web-based communication. Trending and real-time searchability have achieved social, organizational, and commercial utility to a degree and diversity unrivaled by any other social media platform, save maybe Facebook. Twitter provides libraries with myriad creative outreach applications and encourages what in my own experience can be wildly productive professional backchannel discourse. Plus, now that Oprah Winfrey and David Lynch are both updating regularly, the site might as well be canonized in the popculturium.

And yet, I still think that at its core Twitter is simply right now’s next big thing, sure to be knocked off its pedestal by Google Wave or something else sooner or later. Moreover, it is following the predictable tech startup arc almost perfectly:

Stage 1. Confusing blog buzz 
Stage 2. Reactionary doomcrying about whatyouhadforbreakfast status updates
Stage 3. Noticed by NPR, which flogs it to death
Stage 4. Takes off in a big way
Stage 5. Creators sell for billions or arrange an IPO (this is where we are currently)
Stage 6. Finally, either A) relative stability (Facebook) or B) meteoric decline (MySpace)

Don’t get me wrong: I am by no means tweetphobic, and while I was publicly busted some months ago for poking fun at the service’s slow initial adoption among non-librarians, I enthusiastically (though sporadically) tweet with the rest of them via @charbooth. But the most significant trend I see—the popularization of visual data in the hands of users—is swimming right under Twitter’s surface, albeit far less obviously than the fabled Fail Whale.

Social media and visualization
As weary as I and others might be of the breathless microblogging-as-miracle media narrative, I am in its debt for catalyzing a significant development in information behavior: the popularization of data visualization as a modest means of communicating the big picture. Data visualization is the practice of summarizing vast amounts of information in graphical form. For a quick primer on the subject, see the examples at Information Aesthetics and the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, or watch Gapminder creator Hans Rosling demonstrate the “beauty of statistics” in his TED presentation on global health.

Twitter has undoubtedly fueled this recent renaissance of what Yale Professor Emeritus and design guru Edward Tufte calls “the visual display of quantitative information,” or the pie charts, scatterplots, stack graphs, and so forth that have been puzzled over if not downright ignored for centuries. After eons of being relegated to the nerdiverse, this is the year in which visualization tools finally made statistics sexy. The difference is that now there exists a vast database that people actually care about (the social web), and a proliferation of built-in and standalone tools and mashups that use open APIs (application programming interfaces) to provide insight into said data via information graphics.

Vehicles for visual data
Graphical representation of abstract data is nothing new. What is new is that visualization apps are now the universally conspicuous remora clinging to social media sites. What started with the simple folksonomic word cloud has become something resembling a hurricane—from hilarious online dating analytics on OKCupid to textual visualizers like Wordle to en suite graphical tools in Digg and Delicious, visualization has finally gone viral. Social sites thrive on large, complicated data sets like the daily millions of up-to-the-second Twitter @s, trends, and mentions. Like Google, Flickr, Facebook, and countless others, Twitter’s creators made their API public, so that anyone with the requisite skills can create programs to mash, translate, and regurgitate tweets, user information, and location data. By mining and charting movements across large swaths of information, its user-creators can gain insight into human trends that might otherwise be obscured.

Twitter stands out because its simple, location-based transparency and relentless immediacy lend themselves perfectly to visualization—tweets come on so fast and furious that they are almost impossible to follow, making graphical summaries of user-generated content extremely useful.

Wondering where across the world updates are happening in real time? Try Twitterverse. Curious about major trending topics? Try Tweetstats. Dying to know who’s cussing like a real-time sailor? Cursebird has you covered. Twitter visualization apps also allow users to chart their own statistics, taking the proverbial web-based navel-gazing to new depths. Similar tools are out there for every social site under the sun, but Twitter has raised the bar for knowledge of data visualization simply because it creates so much dynamic interest in the weird, random, and right-now that is at ever-increasing numbers of fingertips.

Visualizing the library
The rising popularity of visualization affects how people engage with our stock and trade: information. When data becomes prettier to look at, not only does it become more comprehensible, it also becomes more interesting. Graphical representations capture attention and engage people with information in ways text often does not, and visualization tools lend themselves to any number of teaching and information communication scenarios. Even if you write Twitter or other social tools off as outside the orbit of librarianship, the growing expectation it and other social sites creates among users for visualized, rich information is quite significant.

Visualization is fast becoming an integral aspect of information fluency, and is by no means limited to social media. As average web users interact more frequently with graphical information displays, their ability to interpret and critique similar representations should improve as well. As visualization tools proliferate, many will become more skilled at rapidly making sense of charts and graphics, meaning that their expectation to search and sort results by visual means—not to mention their skill at creating similar visualizations—is likely to increase proportionally.

Putting visualization to good use
Analysis of library collections, sites, staff, and users can also be aided by graphical representation—for instance, at Internet Librarian in 2009, dream team Lisa and Will Kurt presented on several visualization projects they spearheaded using the open source software Graphviz at the University of Nevada, Reno. I use visualization tools constantly in my own work, from user research to instruction—the Visual Thesaurus is invaluable when discussing taxonomy and keywords with students, while the best online dictionary ever, Wordnik, features mashup components that let you chart word usage on a timeline and in Flickr tags (and watch Wordnik’s creator, lexicographer heroine, and self-professed “library geek” Erin McKean, as she redefines the dictionary in her own TED talk). Countless tools are available for creating graphs and sparklines, while the built-in response summary function in Google Docs is indispensable in assessing survey results quickly.

From the research perspective, as digital libraries grow in scope and complexity, data mining and results visualization is likely to become integral to many disciplines. At the 2009 Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access conference organized by UC Berkeley’s School of Information, the potential of using the GBS “research corpus” to perform vast textual searches on millions of books carries implications for information representation in libraries even on a much smaller scale. According to the excellent new book Search User Interfaces by Marti Hearst (available free online), effective visualization in search and retrieval has always been challenging from a usability standpoint. As librarians, we have a responsibility to consider how to harness visual communication to augment the discoverability and usability of our collections and services, and to provide support to users with graphical information representation needs.

Char Booth (charbooth@gmail.com, @charbooth), E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and a 2008 LJ Mover & Shaker, blogs at infomational.com




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