According to Michael Honey, lecturer at University of Canberra, visual displays of small amounts of data that are already quiet easily processed by a person are called Info graphics. This in essence is what the students of Network Media are going to explore.
We are more interested in Data Visualization that can give access quickly and effectively to the masses that without the visual representation would have a difficult if not impossible task to digesting the information.
Here is a simple but effective data visualization of data from both the American and Iraqi governments and other news organisations. It displays information for the to date 2,592 recorded deaths of American and coalition troops over the course of a year.This was a visual data representation that was used in The New York Times.
Adam Ostrow from Mashable a social media guide, listed 16 Visualization Tools that he found "visually stunning and delightfully useful".
Top of the list was Fidg't.
The Fidg't Visualizer allows you to play around with your network. You interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag.
One I thought was great,specially considering the way we look at the Internet in our Network Media Unit (how different sites and people communicate, share information and form online communities), was Walk2Web which allows you to visualize the connections between sites, while allowing to view, review, bookmark and vote for your favorite sites. Here's a video that explains how it works.
There is an incredible amount of data that is already accumulated in different data banks and this is continual growing. With access to the Internet being more readily available to more and more people via portable phones and other portable devices. The Internet has become a rich source of data with alot of information that is submitted by people that although seems mundane by itself when amasses and displayed in a visual format can produce some beautiful and interesting concepts of data evaluation.
