Cameron Forbes

TS 400 Book Report

The Virtual Self

Nora Young

Data Visualization: The Artistry Of Statistics

In her book, The Virtual Self, Nora Young looks at the increasing amount of information we are sharing online. She discusses the potential ramifications of all this information sharing. Young tries to look for a positive direction for our information-flooded society. Throughout the book Young looks at things like the self-tracking information that people share online. She breaks self-tracking into two categories. First, personal/individual self-tracking, which could be anything from taking a picture of what you had for breakfast or saying you’re going to the gym. The second category Young talks about is external tracking. External tracking is the kind of tracking that companies and governments do. Young also discusses other topics relative to big data, such as the importance of data mapping in making use of big data. Young talks about finding ways to concisely present the important information that the data reveals. Young also discusses the topic of privacy in this new “ecosystem of information”. (Young, Nora. The virtual self, pg. 161) She talks about the seemingly ever-changing privacy settings that big companies like Facebook have. Young also makes sure to mention a few of Facebooks past oversteps in their privacy settings. The Virtual Self looks at the important issues in our societies increasingly technical culture.

For my report I am going to look at how data mapping will become the most important tool in the data integration of the masses of data we are generating. Nora Young expresses in her book that we need “to find ways to make the story that data tells comprehensible.” (Young, Nora. The virtual self, pg. 139) Through “dynamic [and] interactive graphics” (Young, Nora. The virtual self, pg. 144) we will have been able to create enlightening infographics models to clearly show the importance of the given information.

In the last few years I have seen utilization of data mapping and infographic technologies, especially in sports. There is a company called Sportvu that using cameras and tracking systems that generate huge amounts of data of sports games. Sportvu right now is being used mostly by basketball and soccer. However, most of my experience in looking at their data mapping has been in basketball. Most NBA teams have adopted Sportvu. The technology essentially tracks every player’s movement, the ball’s movement, shooting percentages, and many other smaller categories. The information Sportvu generated was coveted by NBA geeks who were eager to try to utilize it with their teams. However, despite the information obvious relevance, the biggest challenge to get the NBA team to use Sportvu was getting coaches and other more hands on basketball people to utilize the technology. Many NBA coaches are quite hard-headed and set in their ways of evaluation. This is where the data mapping and infogrpahics were so important. As the massive amounts of Sportvu data was made into infographics several teams started to use the information. In a short time, many more teams were using this Sportvu technology and using its findings to influence their decisions. Currently, all 30 NBA teams are using Sportvu. To me this is an affirmation of the importance of data mapping in finding the significance in the masses of data. There are even teams that make nearly all player decisions and coaching strategies focused on the findings of this data. Although the NBA & soccer (I am not sure to what extent soccer uses this) are the first major sports to utilize big data through data visualizations I foresee this becoming a major part of how we look at sports going forward.

Although the example I presented might have been slightly long winded it shows that these massive amounts of data are already being successfully simplified and presented in a way that makes its significance easy to understand. Nora Young describes how she was explained the purpose of data visualization as “allowing you to very quickly get a sense of a lot of data”. (Young, Nora. The virtual self, pg. 145) Professional sports use of data visualization of big data is a great test of whether we can make use of all this data we are generating. Many people question whether we can actually make use of all the data we are producing. In my opinion the answer to this question is almost certainly yes. Professional sports are a highly competitive business and is not an easy first field test for the validity of data visualization. However, sports are just one area of use.

In conclusion, I believe that data visualization is the key to illuminating the vital points of information that lay deep in the sea of data that our society is generating. Young discusses many different areas of life where mass amounts of data are being generated. While many of these areas of life with big data collections are not yet comprehensible, the continued push of data visualization should facilitate our understanding the data in these other areas of life.

References

Young, Nora. The virtual self: how our digital lives are altering the world around us. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 2012. Print.