Visualize Your Results

February 22, 2013 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Visualize Your Results

Many users of Data Harmony are intimidated by data visualization. Maybe intimidated is the wrong word, but they certainly have anxiety around seeing their analysis in images, as opposed to lists of tens of thousands words.

During a presentation at the 9th Annual Data Harmony Users Group meeting, Access Innovations editor/taxonomist, Ben Barnes, made the topic of data visualization approachable. An anthropologist by training and experience, Barnes reminded us that written communication started as visuals. The early cave paintings depicted actual celestial events. Language has been symbolic from the beginning. So now we can look at our data representations with a different perspective, reminded of their pictorial origins.

This approach feeds that part of our brain that wants more than numbers and words. It feeds the dimensional parts of our vision and other senses all the while, providing valuable and usable data.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.