Data and the Monkey Brain

The excellent How the World Works blog by Andrew Leonard over at salon.com links today to a lecture cool enough to make me want to go back to school. (Until I think of the dozens of graduates students who must have given their lives on its behalf...) The lecture is about worldwide economic development data, but its visual presentation is compelling.

At the end of the day, it's just animated scatter plots. But it speaks to the intuitive part of our brain -- and harnesses the massive processing power available in our visual centers -- in a way that tables or static plots never will. I'm always looking for ways to present data in a way that engages the "monkey brain" that doesn't have to think consciously to absorb infromation.

It seems that animation (especially interactive animation) is one of the latest bag of tricks in data presentation. Perhaps this is because modern graphics hardware and internet bandwidth make animation of even large amounts of data quite simple. The next big thing in mapping is animated time series. I don't think it's a coincidence.

The company which makes the world's development data "understandable, enjoyable, and free" -- and the snazzy viewers in the video -- can be found at Gapminder.