SenseMaking (Data Visualisation) - Computerphile

Turning data into something visual helps humans make sense of things. Kai explains and shows an open source tool for tracking your research.

This video was a reupload due to some audio glitches on the original copy.


This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[fireclub]

Cool to see some softer topics like this on Computerphile! This is a hugely undervalued skill, and the tool seems pretty neat

[jjdawg]

Data visualization is a great and diverse topic. It gets very interesting and challenging when you try to visualize relationships between things beyond a few dimensions/parameters. Hope to see more of this in the future!

[djyotta]

Yup, my perseverance in searching out the "best" solution definitely determines my metric. After 30 tabs, I develop a metric which helps me reduce the tabs to 3 or 4. I pick an arbitrary set of "deal breakers" that whittle down to 2 options. Then I decide which one feels the "best". It's terrible logic, but gets the job done and I have some confidence I have one of the near optimal outcomes.

[agleesb]

What a great vocal recording to back up a really interesting topic. There's something quite captivating in his delivery.

[hurrayboy]

Whoever wrote this title shares my love for UpperCamelCase

[TheMasonX]

I loved this, I'll definitely have to give the extension a shot! This could be huge, data and analysis is what we're all about

[mitannichatra]

As someone currently going through google’s data analysis course this was very cool to see.

[dimvoly]

I always find this to be a highly non-linear process, by the time I organize the data in a way that makes sense, my approach changes to suit what I've learnt so far. So I stick to low cost visualizations like a nested list in notepad since they get discarded often.

[nHans]

Whenever talking about data visualization, it's rather obligatory to mention *Edward Tufte's* book _"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information."_ Of course, Kai wasn't talking about data visualization in the traditional sense. As others have pointed out, the tool he demonstrated is a so-called *_mind-map._* I love mind-maps; I use them extensively for taking notes, analyzing issues, and making decisions. And yes—as Kai himself pointed out—the tool that he showed does require a lot more engineering to make it usable!

[Veptis]

I really like great data visualization. In fact, I often complain when there is bad visualizations. For example people just do bar charts instead of histograms - or even violin plots.

[jayarrow]

It's a bummer that SenseMap is not available as a Firefox extension. Otherwise I would have liked to integrate the tool into my workflow.

[rugbybeef]

A John Snow who knew a lot more than nothing!

[suvelmanoharan]

They have changed the front ✨, anyone know what font they are using ?

[OverWilliam]

Somebody please introduce this kind gentleman to Roam Research

[JacobSaki]

I think this would be really useful if it could take in information on lots of users page views and output information about the different paths customers take through a product.

[kitty_gamer]

sounds like he's saying "data validation" lol

[rejophilipjose]

who knew buying a camera for taking baby pictures, could explain all this. 🔥

[snowballeffect]

Very nice! Would love access to this extension!

[Yupppi]

The graph about the camera information gathering reminds me of all the classes in manufacturing technology as minor/major in engineering and how it all felt like extremely unnecessary hand-waving that is common sense put into "method" and analysed. Of course valuable in some contexts, but just observing it felt so empty of value. This graph however would indeed help the process if you were to compare cameras like I did with plenty of different models that were of the same line and such before I ended up choosing what to buy.

[juantelle]

I’d love to understand the inner workings of dataviz tools such as tableau etc. how do they work in the backend