This video clip shows Hans Rosling, a Swedish public health expert, introducing a new data visualisation tool his foundation has worked on. Some of the issues he covers are brilliant, and it really does get across to me the importance of being able to manipulate data in tactile ways. Quite how we get from that to visualisation of networks, pff, who can say?

Got this from Crooked Timber which links to a nice quick Youtube vij of Gapminder too.

What kind of thing do I want to see being visualised? Oo, could be lots of things. But I like Rosling's focus on tools that take data and visualise it, rather than focusing on, say, Flash-like films that give a non-interactive presentation. However pretty, its playing that counts.

I keep on thinking it should be possible, for example, to have an army of robots constructing an interactive timeline of events, ideas, theories, etc, from Wikipedia data - to create a visual way in to it. Is it fanciful that a chart of entries with Kant in, cross-referenced with dates, might produce a lineage of his ideas? Er, yes, probably, especially when compared to what an expert could produce. It would be superficial, and probably entirely meaningless.

Ah well.

But! Rosling does give some very pretty diagrams in his talk above, and seems an enthusiastic supporter of the democratisation of data. This is never something that's going to get people marching on Parliament... ("what do we want? Non-proprietary database access! When do we want it? On demand at all public access points nationally, and with on-hand assistance from expert staff!" Hmm....)

Anyway, here's a Guardian article by some enthusiastic data liberation front campaigners, and here's their website.

This, combined with a bunch of people working on online visualisation and interactivity tools... that'd be the thing. Possibly.