The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless

David McCandless turns complex data sets, like worldwide military spending, media buzz, and Facebook status updates, into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

Talk by David McCandless.

[humanalltoohuman]

Brilliant presentation!

As a data analyst, I can say that doing such things as a job is really a lot of fun. Its like detective work... you get a bunch of numbers (meaningless numbers, mostly) but then you get to use your tools to see what most people don't see, and to make sense of them and help others do the same. Then you get to change how people think :)

[louc]

Data mining was such a buzzword during my college years, but we were never taught how to properly display it. Then my senior year professor shows us this. I fell in love, and now can show my clients information in a fun, interactive, and beautiful way. THANK YOU!

[Moiez]

As a data-analyst-to-be, McCandles is a superhero in the data world when it comes to visualizations. Inspiring, and such a beautiful presentation.

[TEDEd]

Re-upload from last week with aspect ratio error fixed. Enjoy!

[seanpaulshanor]

"Let the dataset change your mindset." Love that.

[AmdusMzrt]

Graphs available at w w w . informationisbeautiful . net !

[jigneshjadav]

Data visualization can change anyone's perspective. No matter how complex the data is, simple diagrams always makes it easier to understand and convey the message effectively.

[ProtonovaR]

Brilliant presentation, I wrote a research paper while in college (computer engineering) about this exact same topic and even applied it to programming (no code but an actual visual prog lang) and data collection/parsing. Glad to see that I wasn't the only one thinking of making data more efficient to absorb without bias.

[hananthefake]

watching this on 23 Nov. 2020, 8 years later and still impressing

[unprogram]

This popped up in my feed. I remember this guy from when he used to be a video games journalist, his writing was funny and entertaining. I think he was a wizard at Doom multiplayer from memory. Nice to see that he is still around.

[jigneshdarji]

Was I the only one watching this during COVID-19 quarantine who didn't laugh at the pandemic molehill peaks?

[pifie]

The problem with expressing data with images is that *it makes pretty hard to criticize the interpretation of data*, which is _critical_ to the meaning of it. It can be seen on the baloon-health graph, for example: How do you chart evidence on a _trust_ scale, for example, if it can even change from person to person?

We don't have such a consensus (and maybe it would be wrong to have one), so there isn't just one visualization for each relationship of groups of data, and maybe some visualizations just point out things that aren't really there.

A thing that is needed along with this is hard philosophical-ish discussion about what it is said (or expressed in images). For that, you need mostly to not let details out.

[lelaniadam]

This talk is beautiful :-) Sharing it with my Business Research and Communication class mates!

[KeepinItReal]

This is making me rethink my career choice. I really love data, and I can see now with this being by far the best Ted talk I’ve ever seen, I love data just a little more than the average person. This was really good. Data is beautiful! 😅😅

[auberjean]

Ted-Ed and David McCandless
This proves that the right Info-Graphic is worth a thousand words. Thank you for this excellent presentation.

[denizyalcn]

Thanks. Without any doubt this is one of the best Ted talks.

[conmak]

Would be interesting to see his "mountains out of molehills" chart factoring in Covid-19

[nyteskun]

just started learning tableau for fun.
analyst field looks fun.

been working in supply chain for over 4 years and never see higher up really care about this data visualization.

[IvyANguyen]

Amazing! I'd love to see an updated one made for these days given how much we've been thinking of data over the last few years (COVID-19, elections, inflation, ...).

[yacintashafira]

sir, you've delivered an excellent talk because now it makes me want to know more about data, even considering myself to work as Big Data Engineer