Grasping with the eyes
It seems like big data is everywhere you look. And in a way, it is: Maps, medical scans, and weather charts are commonplace forms of data visualization. Each was examined during “Thinking with Your Eyes,” a two-day conference that brought together experts in the arts, sciences, humanities, and technology — as well as academic and computing groups from across Harvard — to investigate how graphic representation brings knowledge to life. “In a technological age where large amounts of data can be captured like never before, how big data is used and portrayed presents significant challenges,” said keynote speaker Martin Wattenberg, who along with Fernanda Viégas leads Google’s “Big Picture” visualization research group. Author James Davenport, who created the popular “The United States of Starbucks” graph that shows that 80 percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a link in the coffee chain, pointed to the potential for wider impact. “Visualization makes...