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Visualization

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Information Visualization

What is it?

A graphical, visual way to look at information.

We live in the information age and any attempt to focus on a topic can quickly result in information overload. How do we sort and sift through all the information available not only to determine what is important, but also to increase our understanding or create new knowledge?

One way to do this is through visualization. Through the power of visualization we can better understand our data and increase our learning. Information visualization is an important tool for research and learning. Learn more about visualization tools and visualization techniques to improve your visual literacy.

Why Use Visualization?

1. Sometimes pictures really are better than words
2. You can discover patterns
3. You can see your information in new ways
4. Help you understand your information on more than one level

Learn more about visualization

or learning visual literacy

Visual-Literacy.org describes visualization or visual literacy as the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations.

Visualization, or the use of visual representations, offers us insight into bodies of knowledge that we are gathering, studying or struggling to undering and can help us create and communicate knowledge, or devise new ways of representing this information.

The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods pictured here offers descriptions, details, and methods for various visualization techniques.

Tools you can use

to create your own visualizations

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds: Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Many Eyes: Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns.
Tagxedo - Tag Cloud with Styles: Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning tag cloud

One take on an information set...

You can copy and paste text into Wordle or use an rss feed (such as one provided by a blog) and then programs such as Wordle or Many Eyes will generate the information graphic for you.