You’re a Vizard Errol
By Errol Lloyd
Hi all!
Yes, I’m catching up on my Dr Who.
I’m Errol and I’ve just joined as the ResCom in the new Data Vizard stream, which is dedicated to getting researchers sharing, communicating and collaborating through visualisations on the web.
Worth a dance I reckon.
During the day I’m a neuroscientist. I work in systems neuroscience, which broadly tries to work out how the brain and mind work. In this introspective era, it’s an undoubtedly big scientific question, with the added curiosity of potentially connecting, through a cohesive understanding of the mind, the mechanistic sciences with politics and art (see Susan Langer for more).
Specifically, I use the visual system as a means to study the brain. This is because vision involves nearly half our brain. We densely sample the world along a number of dimensions—wavelength, energy, space, time — simultaneously. And over many inter-weaving iterations, we integrate and contrast multiple streams of information to finally develop an understanding of our world.
Dali, Head Exploding
Soooo, why data visualisation then? Well … "vision involves nearly half our brain. We densely sample …etc … an understanding of our world”. Vision is kinda our brains’ thing and probably instrumental to understanding, discovery and science.
Even Plato is surprisingly on point on this, calling vision the cause of the greatest benefit to us, having ’created the art of number and … given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe’. (Plato, Timaeus, 47a)
I see our aim as being to go further, to break the ‘collaborative ice’ by having researchers tell the story of their research to the world. As Alice asked “what is the use of a book … without pictures or conversations’’, so we ask what’s the use of research without visualisations and open data?
Us researchers are bad at the communication thing, and it hurts not only ourselves and our standing in society but science and research generally. By tapping into the brilliant little abstract visual computer in our brains, visualisations can not only summarise and make navigable and comprehensible otherwise boring or impenetrable data, but can also capture the essence of a topic or question and close the understanding gap so many of us find hard to bridge. Visualisations can tell our research stories.
And what if we all put them on the web? That might even be a little magical.
Also, eye candy is eye candy:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Glad to have joined the gang!
Errol Lloyd.
