Visualisation: Visual representations of data and information

Introduction

How many times a day do you hear it said that we are drowning in a sea of information? As the cost of computer data storage goes down, it becomes easier and cheaper to store ever more data about ever more things, from corporate information to personal data – yet how are we ever to make sense of all this data and uncover some of the potentially valuable information it contains?

Visualisation can help. This is because, of all the human senses, the visual sense is one of the most powerful. In this unit, you will learn how to interpret, and in some cases create, visual representations of data and information that display a wide range of data sets in a meaningful way.

This is an adapted extract from the Open University course Communication and information technologies (T215) [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .