Blog Post 4: Information Visualization & Distant Reading

 Information Visualization & Distant Reading

CHAPTER SIX

"To understand literature, we must stop reading." (New York Times)

Data can be easier to understand and read if there is a way to visualize its thorough, complex data that is there either way. Creating a visualization is simple because any data that is quantified can be turned into a visual which makes interpreting data a whole lot easier. However, I've learned that visualizing data also creates an illusion because anything can be thrown into a pie chart or a graph. This is where parameterization comes in to create value within the data. 

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Literature is not data" or so they say...

Data mining is an analysis of searching for patterns and understanding their meaning. Data mining and analysis tie into both visualization and distant readings because it is what we do and how we interpret the data being obtained. 

After looking at the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, I was interested when I first clicked on the link to see what I initially saw; a ton of red small dots interlinked with messy strings. I immediately thought this was an interesting way of visualizing the data here. As I perused the website, through a lot of lag and glitching, I observed that each name shows its relevance to Francis Bacon, in degrees (similar to something like a family tree, yet the more people between is one degree away from Francis Bacon), somehow, or somewhere on the chart. It is an interesting and interactive way to display data. There is a question in the textbook that says, "Is labeling efficient for use?" and I believe in this website it is. Without the labels of every name, I would have been way more confused that I initially was. I was able to make connections after seeing names such as 'Francis Bacon' and 'King James I and VI.' I didn't know what to expect from the title but I was interested in understanding this project.

I was immediately drawn into the second reading, by the title, and the visualization on the website when I clicked the link. From the start, I immediately read "A data visualization experiment to trace the waves of the pandemic" Something that also immediately sparked my interest. There was a lot I obtained from the website about the emotional toll the pandemic had on society through Twitter which is also a form of data collecting, it was interesting to see that Tweets followed the spikes in cases throughout 2020 to the present. I was actually really interested in this project and thought about it for a while after reading it. It was very well done and stated its significance. I subconsciously analyzed it in my head with what we learned from the last analysis project, which I found to be interesting.