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# The Value of Visualisation
###### Why create a Visualisation?
- Answer questions (or discover them)
- Make decisions
- See data in context
- Expand memory
- Support graphical calculation
- Find patterns and trends
- Present arguments or tell a story
> A picture is worth a 1000 words
**Record** information
- Blueprints, photographs, seismographs
**Communicate** information to others
- Share and persuade
- Think of Florence Nightingale using a graph to show that infection was the leading cause of death in hospitals
- Collaborate and revise
- Think of the London tube map: before it was geographically accurate, now it is only topologically accurate
Analyse data to **support reasoning**
- Find patterns
- Think of the London Cholera map, how John Snow found out where the infection was coming from
- Discover errors in data
- Expand memory
- Imagine doing a sum like $34\times 52$ mentally versus with a pen and paper
- Visualising the sum (column multiplication) can expand your memory
- Develop and assess hypotheses
#### Different Stages of Visualisation
![1645033524.png](img/1645033524.png)
- Data transformation
- Create a structural model, schema, mapping raw data into data tables
- Visual Mapping
- Create a visual spatial model, transforming data tables into visual structures
- View Transformations
- Create views of the Visual Structures by specifying graphical parameters such as position, scaling and clipping.
![1645033689.png](img/1645033689.png)
###### Acquire
- Obtain the data, whether from a file on a disk or network
###### Parse
- Provide some structure for the data’s meaning, and order it into categories
###### Filter
- Remove all but interesting data
###### Mine
- Apply methods from statistics or data mining as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context
- Work out mean, standard deviation etc
###### Represent
- Choose a visual model
- Bar chart, graph, pie chart etc
###### Refine
- Improve the basic representation to make it clearer and more engaging
###### Interact
- Add methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible
##### Interaction is Vital for Exploration
- Engage in a dialogue with your data
- Employ interaction in a more fundamental manner to strengthen the power of visualisation