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February 21, 2006
Trendalyzer accessibility
Trendalyzer accessibility: Great example of data visualization... a professor lectures on the differing relationships between newborn life expectancy and a nation's general production, over time, but finds that the words don't do as good a job as a data-fed animation -- easier to visualize the relationships, more accessible to people with varying language skills. We humans have had centuries of visual and aural processing before we added language abstraction... those who reduce the idea of "accessibility" to "can text describe it?" are really offbase, I think. Sample: "Seeking to make its visual tools available to the broadest possible constituency, Gapminder has worked from the beginning to create software that allows others to create their own visual presentations of the data. Accordingly, Gapminder has been developing a program called Trendalyzer that works from the data itself, rather than a fixed graphical presentation. Developed in Macromedia's Flash, the current beta version of Trendalyzer is preloaded with a built-in data set, but can also accept imported Microsoft Excel files, allowing users to create animations derived from hundreds of different variables." I don't know if they're trying to present particular conclusions with this data, and didn't readily see an illuminating example from their site, but I like their conclusion about how multiple media types and interactivity can convey ideas in ways that text alone cannot.
Posted by John Dowdell at February 21, 2006 8:35 PM