Monday, June 23, 2014

Being visual - graphicacy


 Image above: Amazing maps

Related links to Spatialworlds 
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
GeogSpace

Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
manning@chariot.net.au    

Where am I??  
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'


The art of visualising data

This posting is dedicated to the capacity of spatial technology to visualise data - the graphicacy skill/art of geography using modern technology. 
 
"Graphicacy is concerned with the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics. Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on graphics to communicate information. Until recently, words and numbers were the main vehicles for communication – compared with graphics, they have long been relatively easy to produce and distribute. However, advances in information and communications technology and visualisation techniques now mean that graphics are far more readily available and more widely used than ever before." 

 Here is an interesting YouTube on Graphicacy, tied in with literacy and numeracy.


To illustrate graphicacy, here are some great examples from my Spatial Literacy Scoop.it

An Urban World: UNICEF's new data visualization of urban population growth over the next 40 years. This graphic depicts countries and territories with 2050 urban populations exceeding 100,000. Circles are scaled in proportion to urban population size. Hover over a country to see how urban it is (percentage of people living in cities and towns) and the size of its urban population (in millions).

* Population pyramids: Powerful predictors ofthe future 

Population statistics are like crystal balls -- when examined closely, they can help predict a country's future (and give important clues about the past). Kim Preshoff explains how using a visual tool called a population pyramid helps policymakers and social scientists make sense of the statistics, using three different countries' pyramids as examples.

Interactive Map of the World, through a flash based Map Viewer application which provides a bird's eye view of every country in the world. It provides country facts such as population, area, GDP, time zone etc.

To illustrate the network of globe-trotting journeys, Abel and Sander generated the above fantastic graphic for 2005 to 2010. Migration flows for different world regions are shown as color-coded arcs, with lines that begin close to the circle's edge depicting outgoing migrations (as shown with the arrows for "Central America"). Fatter arcs represent larger migrations and the numbered tick marks indicate how many millions of people are involved

"Some beautiful, information-dense cartography, which provide a moment of self-reflection like a giant, geographic mirror.”  Seth Dixon


People get the general shape of the world when the draw a map of the world from memory.

Maps after maps, some quirky some just plain interesting and useful.

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