The Future of Data Visualisation

Earlier this week my agency hosted a small gathering of geeks, techs, nerds and strategists to hear from data visualisation pioneer Manuel Lima. Manuel is the curator of the site visualcomplexity.com that brings together stunning examples of data visualisation from around the globe. His talk was a re-run of his slot at the recent TED global event in Oxford.

He began by discussing the reasons behind the growing fashion for ‘data vis’, the key ones being:

- the never-ending growth of computing power

- the increasing availability of large data sets from all areas of life in a digital world

- the mainstream exposure of data vis given by the likes of the New York Times

- the availability of tools to create visualisations, such as Processing

He then talked us through some beautiful examples, all of which you can find on his site. The emphasis was more on the types of visualisation that he is finding rather than the meaning of the analysis that was being conducted. Data was as diverse as tourist routes in Barcelona, email traffic within Enron and friendship groups within a classroom of school children.

And this is where the debate really takes off. Are these visualisations useful? They can undoubtedly be beautiful - it can’t be long before a gallery exhibits a collection of them (they will be jaw-dropping on a bigger canvas). And I suppose any analysis is only going to be relevant to those that commissioned or undertook it. But if the discipline remains primarily an artistic one then I think it will remain marginal.

Thankfully Lima is aiming higher. His stated aim is to nurture what is currently a pastime for a few tech geeks and digital artists into a fully fledged academic discipline. A discipline that can be truly useful to business and government and one that brings clarity and insight from the tangled mass of data that is being accumulated in every area of modern life.

I also wonder if any research agencies (the experts in bringing clarity from data?) are tapping into people like Lima? If they’re not, they should.

Guardian Readers and Weak Ties

Nothing to do with their taste in clothes, but lots to do with their ability to influence other people and spread word of mouth. These are the findings of new research from, of course, The Guardian.

It's actually a serious piece of work, taking on board existing theories about influencers and the process of word of mouth and building in new qual and quant evidence to bring the whole thing to life. It was conducted on behalf of The Guardian by Crowd DNA (led by Andy Crysell formerly of Ramp Industry) and is nicely packaged - although the design and art direction could be a bit more more exciting. Check it out here

It sits very much on the Gladwell end of the Gladwell vs Watts debate over influencers, in other words some people are much more influential than others and can be identified as such (it's easy, they read The Guardian!)

You can certainly see the logic that people with bigger social networks (made up of more 'loose ties', rather than simply strong ones to close friends and family) are likely to be more vocal and potentially more influential. But there is still the sense that word of mouth is very sector-specific, ie an influencer for nappy brands probably has little influence with regard to mobile phones.

Still, it is good to see media owners doing this kind of research in times like this - although I bet it was commissioned pre-downturn.

this blog is having two weeks off

Time Poor, Data Rich

I’ve been pulling together a piece to help empower planners at my agency to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in to doing their own insight gathering and analytics, rather than brief an analyst to do it for them.

When you line everything up it’s amazing what a modern day planner/researcher can get if they know where to look. I thought I’d share some of these tools here in the hope that someone out there might be able to add in some of their own.

Google’s Adplanner can tell you about site visitors, time spent and demographics (Google are a bit hazy on methodology, but they’re a clever bunch so let’s just play along). It can also allow you to create a bespoke audience based on sites they have visited, keywords used in search, etc, and then look at what other sites they visit (note, you need to sign in to Google to use it).

The daddy of web insight tools Google’s Insight for Search has been around a while. It’s a breeze to use and allows you to look at search trends for multiple terms by region and time. Top tip, combine it with their Adwords Keyword Tool to get actual search volumes.

Wordle has brought some much needed pizzazz to tag clouds. They just look so pretty. Paste in text from any doc, or try pasting in Tweets around a keyword (use this to find the tweets) to instantly visualise how a brand is being discussed.

Tag Galaxy must win the prize for visualisation. It crawls Flickr and grabs images tagged with your keyword before illustrating the results on a spinning interactive globe. Great for demonstrating the visual cohesion, or lack of, for a brand.

Brilliant new tools are also emerging from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other digital giants who are sitting on a ton of data. In time these will be as sophisticated and easy to use as the Google suite.

The most amazing thing though, is that all this is available to anyone, anywhere for absolutely nothing, zero, zilch.