The New York Times article “Learning to See Data ”  discusses novel ways of gleaning valuable insights from the deluge of data by presenting it visually. One of the ways involves working with an artist named Daniel Kohn.

“Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many cases defy interpretation; there’s no way to discern a meaningful pattern in any intuitive way. To extract some order from this chaos, analysts need to continually reimagine the ways in which they represent their data — which is where Mr. Kohn comes in. He spent 10 years working with scientists and knows how to pose useful questions. He might ask, for instance, What if the data were turned sideways? Or upside down? Or what if you could click on a point on the plotted data and see another dimension?”

As the field of business intelligence aims to take the deluge of data and turn it into actionable information, understanding how the information can be presented in ways that enhance decision-making is important. I briefly discuss data visualization in Chapter 15, Advanced Analytics in my book BI Guidebook-From Data Integration to Analytics.  This New York Times article is a great source of inspiration and information for anyone who is interested in the clear, effective presentation of information. You can check it out here.