processes & systems improvement
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The art of information City’s giCentre is at the forefront of research and practice in data visualisation – an increasingly important series of techniques that provide access to data through interactive graphics. This work is having an impact in areas as diverse as local government planning and climate change research.
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he increasing ubiquity of information technology in the past few decades has created a vast amount of data, capturing everything from society’s shifting demographics to the planet’s changing climate. In recent years the value of such data has been recognised – the shift towards ‘open government’, for example, has seen public bodies worldwide release their information for scrutiny by researchers, journalists and the public at large. But these data often come in great volumes and impenetrable formats. How can analysts uncover the trends that exist within large datasets that contain textual and numerical values, which may change dramatically over time? And once these trends are found, how can they be communicated to a wide and often lay audience? Data visualisation provides a solution. The advent of digital, interactive and online technology has made it possible to present and explore data graphically in new and compelling ways. Well-designed interactive graphics can act as data microscopes that help scientists and society see into the data deluge. The giCentre is at the forefront of research and practice in data visualisation. It has published more than 55 papers in the field, which have been recognised through multiple awards at leading national and international conferences such as IEEE VisWeek and GIS Research UK and published in pioneering works, including O’Reilly’s Beautiful Data (Dykes, J. and Wood, J., 2009. The Geographic Beauty of a Photographic Archive. In: Segaran, T. and Hammerbacher J., eds. Beautiful Data. O’Reilly) and Wiley’s The Map Reader (Dykes, J. and Wood, J., 2011. The Geographic Beauty of a Photographic Archive. In: Dodge, M., Kitchin, R. and Perkins, C., eds. The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation. Wiley Blackwell). The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian have featured giCentre visualisation, as have specialist publications such as Infosthetics and Panlibus.