Posted In: Weekly reflective blog
The artifact that I have chosen for this week is a video by DataPine that demonstrates in a real-world scenario the benefits of using an interactive dashboard. The idea of an interactive dashboard is meant to replace what could be a boring, standstill slideshow presentation.
What I have realized from this video is how on one screen, multiple visualizations are combined to be able to answer all of the questions that a researcher could have. This makes me, personally, extremely happy. Before watching this video and having only looked at the hands on activity for this week, my biggest downfall for each of the different forms of visualization was that they were not able to be compared to each other.
With this interactive dashboard set up, anybody can go to the page and compare one type of visualization to another. This is valuable because each type of visualization was chosen specifically to relay the data in the best way possible. Sometimes other forms of visualizations are needed in order to accomplish this task.
Though it is great for the interactive dashboard to be able to help compare the different visualizations to another, it also allows for the visualizations themselves to be interactive. What I mean by this is that the visualizations are able to be altered and manipulated by the researcher interacting with the different aspects of that one specific visualization.
Though visually this video has helped me to dive deeper into how I perceive visualizations, there are ideas of data and its relationship to writing that still have kept me thinking this past week.
While reading the module for this week it took me a while to understand that very complex terminology was being explained in a much easier way. After going through the activity on Wednesday it became clear that we were discussing data and how it is usually presented to us.
When I went back to reread the module, I got caught up on the process and history of communication. The process of going from cursive, to print, and having translated that onto hardware is incredible in it of itself. Now to consider the fact that all along the idea of why new visualizations keep being produced is all for one goal: to make communications of information easier and more efficient.
Each new type of visualization is created for a reason. Though each visualization may be very specific, that is all within good reason because it only had one goal to start with: communicating that data the most efficiently.