Welcome to a very brief
introduction to data visualization.
I'm Scott Davidoff.
The first part of the story really is just
to communicate why visualization matters.
One of the fundamental
tenets of this entire course
is really about the fact
that all of the tools that
we have are becoming
prolific at generating data.
And, we are looking for better and
better tools that allow us
to understand that data.
And data visualization is one of
the most powerful tools available to us.
Why should visualization matter?
Well, let me give you a number of reasons,
and
I hope that they tell the story of
the things that visualization can do.
So, the first thing that
visualization can do is it can
reveal invisible parts of the world
that we don't have access to.
You can see in this fluid dynamics
video of air coming across a wing.
How, because unique, applications
of visualization were applied,
that we're able to actually able to see
eddies that are normally not visible.
Another reason is for
us to be able to capture events as they
happen in a way that's not available.
Now, if you look at this particular image,
this is actually taken by
a physician from the 19th
century named Etienne Marey.
And Marey actually figured out
with this device, how to create
a visible marker of the pulse of a human
being by capturing the force in the veins.
Another thing that we can
do with visualization is to
show parts of the world
that are important.
I'd say most boat pilots would be really
paying attention to the shallow parts of
this map.
Another one of the things
that visualization can do
is it allows us to conduct analyses and
understand the world in a way that is
hard just given different types of data.
The example that I'm showing here is a map
of that shows the outbreak
of Cholera in London.
And if you at, at this time,
a physician was trying
to understand what caused the outbreak and
had this, this incredible insight.
What if we took all of the locations where
each of the victims were identified and
plot them on a map?
No one had done this before, and
as you start to see the actual,
the most intense outburst
of cholera focuses around
the location of a well in
the center of the screen.
That well turns out to have been
the source of the cholera outbreak.
And this is one of the first examples
of how placing scientific and
medical data on a map
showed human kind that we
have an ability to understand things
that weren't available previously.
Another one of the things
that visualization can do,
is it can help us tell a story.
You can see in this slide Watson and
Crick have built
a three-dimensional model of DNA.
And, while they understood DNA and
what the helix meant, by giving it
a physical embodiment, it allowed
the rest of the world to understand what
it was that they were coming up with,
and what exactly this helix shape meant.
Another one of the things that
visualization has allowed us to do, is to
see things that simply happen at a level
that's not available to our perception.
If you look at this picture from
the very beginnings of photography.
Muybridge determined a method
to capture rates of a,
frames of film very rapidly,
and at this time,
no one actually understood how
a horse's gallop functions.
And you can see that this was, actually
the first evidence that when a horse runs,
for some time it's actually
not touching the ground.
This kind of information was
not visible to human beings
before the advent of this technology.
So, visualization provides
an amazing capability.
And, the way that I like to summarize it,
is to look at Doug Engelbart.
Turing award winner,
Doug Engelbart's description,
of what he thinks computing
might be able to accomplish.
And it's not to try and replace human
intelligence, but rather to increase
the capability of humans to understand
complex problems and derive solutions.
Effectively, what he is saying is,
computing provides a lever
that is rarely accessible
through other media.
And that, data visualization
magnifies our ability to
understand science and
ultimately the universe.
So I hope this is an enjoyable journey.
And let's dive in, to some of the very
basic facts about data visualization.