It’s no secret that all across the web, people are generating
billions of gigabytes of data per day. This huge amount of information termed
“Big Data,” is impossible to keep track of without first organizing it into an
easily digestible format.
Turning Big Data into Understandable Visuals
Data
visualization can help you to pare down the extensive influxes of data such as
customer interactions, changing industry trends, and daily company operations.
The right data visualization turns overwhelming data into beautiful interactive
charts and graphics that you can use to improve the way that you do business.
Below are a list of sites that we use for daily creative stimulation and
motivation. We thought it would be great to share!
1. Visual.ly
As
the founders of the largest online infographic community, Visual.ly is definitely one of our favourite go-to sites
for creative inspiration. It’s a huge variety of infographics proves how
easy it is to build a data visualization for just about anything. It is
particularly useful when you need good ideas on how to start visualizing
your big data story. Recently, the folks at Visual.ly started to offer their
services to help you to take any size data and convert it into a
compelling infographic. Based on our research they start at around $2,500
and can go as high as $25,000! They are however the best in business. We
plan to give them a try and will post an update.
2. The Functional Art
While
Alberto Cairo is a bit new to the Data Visualization space, and seemed to have
popped up online out of nowhere, since the release of his book and blog ‘Functional Art’ in
2012, he has definitely caught up quickly. Now known as a highly regarded
speaker on the topic of data visualization, his blog quickly nabbed the number
two spot on our list. The one thing to note is that Alberto mainly
focuses on visualizing journalism data, but a lot of what he teaches applies to
the analytics and business intelligence field of practice. In addition to
subscribing to his blog, his @albertocairo twitter account has over 22,000
followers at the time of this posting. We’ve had the pleasure to meet him
and he’s such an amazing guy!
3. Information is
Beautiful
We
were big fans of this book before meeting David McCandless back in May. Not
only is his work compelling, but his very ‘British’ approach to the data viz
topic was quite fun to listen to. While Information is Beautiful type visualizations may be a bit
out of reach for most of ‘us’ regular folks, following his blog is great to
keep the creative juices running. He often focuses on displaying world
related data, so it’s always fun to see what he comes up with next. We’re
big fans!
4. Visualising Data
Founded
by another famed author, Andy Kirk, we love the Visualising Data blog for its diversity in information
but strict focus on data visualization. You can get everything from best
practices to a long list of wild big data visualization examples. Our favourite blog category is ‘Collections’ where Kirk gives a monthly recap of articles
he pulls together with some of the best content on the web. We’re looking
forward to his new book!
5. GE Visualization
Blog
It’s
seldom that we’ll feature a big company like GE as one of our favorite
community sites (we tend to find individual run communities a bit more
interesting), but GE’s Visualization blog has truly done a great job with
their visualization site. They keep the site updated with amazing use
cases of how they use data to literally change the world. Even if you’re
not into the ‘energy’ topic, this blog is intriguing to follow. Perhaps
other big companies will follow suit. Most just talk a good game. Due to
its ‘vast’ budget, GE also posts amazing videos showcasing what they are doing.
Great job for a big enterprise.
6. International Business
Communication Standards:
Providing
a framework with clear rules how to optimize and standardize the communication
of business numbers in order to improve the communication process.
7. Stephanie
Evergreen's website:
Down to
earth, very practical help to improve your data visualization work. Look for
the excellent dataviz checklist: http://stephanieevergreen.com/
These
are our favourite, but I’d like to hear yours.
Zubair Hussain
Sr Software Engineer & Blogger
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