International Development <3 Data Visualization Although you can extract the same information from all three formats, the visualized one is the easiest and fastest to process. You don’t have to struggle through a wall of text, spend hours scanning spreadsheets, or need a specific set of skills to decrypt it, you can just use your eyes and our innate ability to draw patterns to understand the data. By leveraging data visualizations and infographics, we can take the raw data and make it useable. So what to do with all this data? This is where our ability to process images at high “bandwidths” comes in to hand. If that wasn’t mind blowing enough, between 20 we created 90% of all available data at that time. I’ll let that sink in for a second since most of us might need to look up what a quintillion byte is (2.5 exabytes or 2.5 billion gigabytes or 2.5 followed by 18 zeros). How is big fat data changing data visualizations?Īccording to IBM, in 2012 our daily output of data is 2.5 quintillion bytes of data - and that was three years ago. Factoring in the mind’s ability to process visual information 60,000 times faster and with greater understanding than text, you get a mind and eye network that’s primed and ready for data visualization and infographics. If you compare sight with the next strongest sense touch, the processing speed of sight is 10 times faster. He concluded that the sense of sight is comparable to 1250 MB/s, or the same bandwidth as a computer network. The 'Bandwidth of Senses' - the small corner represents that we are only aware of 0.7% of the information we experienceĭanish physicist Tor Nørretranders created the “Bandwidth of Senses” infographic presenting his research on the speed of senses relative to computer terms. Why do we use data visualizations and infographics? Visual communication has evolved since our paleolithic ancestors, but we are still using it to communicate the data of our lives - only now we have a lot more data to represent.

As a species we have been using visual communication since we began finger painting on walls. Everyday you experience data visualizations and infographics, and you might not even be aware of it.

Visualize the tor network