The Internet will transform how we interpret data

At a recent wide-ranging talk around the power of data visualisation at the London Science Museum, David McCandless, best-selling author of Information is Beautiful, discussed how the universality of both data and the internet was providing the platform for more and more people to both understand and contribute to data visualisation.

 

“All of us are being exposed to an information design medium, and it’s training us to expect data and design to come together,” Mr McCandless said, “It’s a primordial language, one that we now learn very early on in our lives. The internet has not only provided us with a medium to spread data – it’s trained us to receive it.”

 

In an age of fake news, this is becoming more important than ever. Mr McCandless acknowledged that this presented an issue in the presentation of data, with any error in processing the data vulnerable to being utilised to promote a narrative. He suggested that data-literacy amongst the population was an important first step:

 

“Fake news is a new landscape that we’re seeing. The response requires a bit more statistical understanding in the population as a whole, whether through education or media, to train people to be more savvy when it comes to interpreting the numbers and helping us navigate the data.”

 

Mr McCandless’s talk, which was hosted by G-Research, a quantitative research and technology company, also noted that although big data is an increasingly popular and, in the eyes of many, potentially lucrative area of interest, many organisations are still not utilising it effectively.

 

“Big data is a noun, but it also describes a process. ‘To big data’ is a process that involves six steps: the gathering and handling of large amounts of data, the structuring and examining of it, and finally the discovering of something within it and delivering that back to your organisation or the world. A lot of organisations are cycling around the first four stages. They’re hoarding large amounts of data, and they’re doing a little bit of analytics. But they’re not really penetrating the discovery and delivery side.”

 

To demonstrate this was one visualisation of UK taxpayer expenditure – Mr McCandless noted how media talk of billions of pounds being spent was at a scale so vast that it made it impossible for observers to relate to. Instead, he presented the costs scaled down to pounds spent per average taxpayer per day. It could then be seen that, for example, ?2.40 is spent per day on the NHS, 19p on overseas aid, and 5p on fire services.

 

“This is mediating between vast seas of data and everyday life,” Mr McCandless said, “Data can sometimes be boring or obvious. We have to contextualise it and build it into a network of meaning, so we can understand it more. We can see the world through data, and ask questions of it. The more acute the question, the better the result. You then use this to create an insight.”

 

As big data continues to sit at the heart of the digital world, these insights – and the ability of more and more people to interpret and present them – are set to become only more important.