One way that newspapers and other media try to manage a lot of information is by making an infographic or diagram.

This type of visual “map” often helps the media to convey complex ideas more quickly and makes it easier for most of us to process.

Unfortunately many of these infographics are becoming quite cluttered as they need to deal with much more information. The answer is – of course; to use much better visualisations as a learning and development approach.

If we had the tools and training to convert our data sources into networks diagrams that we can colour code and sort by note and data point.

The big news is that these ultimate infographics are now here and we have those tools already.

With these new visualisations – we can then decide which variables are relevant and important and which are not so we have a giant leap quantum leap into the future as information consumers and knowledge workers.

More importantly this helps all of us put our ideas into action. When we change our relationship and connection to the data we can understand it with much greater clarity. Better information leverage will give us better outcomes if we take notice learn how to work with these new tools and techniques.

McCandless mentions some work from Tor Nørretranders who converted the senses into a bandwidth diagram metaphor to show us what visual data works much fasters / better than our other senses.

Here is that diagram. We can see that sight in the blue area is many, many times faster then touch, hearing, smell and taste.

Guess why the latest iPads have such great screens? Screens have 3048px resolution at 264 dpi and touch screens which will revolutionise learning tools.

For more on Nørretranders check out this reboot video

“David McCandless makes infographics — simple, elegant ways to see information that might be too complex or too big, small, abstract or scattered to otherwise be grasped.

In his new book, Information Is Beautiful (in the US, it’s being called The Visual Miscellaneum), McCandless and his cadre of info designers take a spin through the world of visualized data, from hard stats on politics and climate to daffy but no less important trends in pop music.

David says Data is the new soil in the beauty of data visualization “

I especially like this paragraph from David at about 10 minutes into the talk.

“If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. And that whole thing — it’s two languages both working at the same time.

We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective.”

So if we can start looking at these ultimate visual maps then we can start finding better answers to – well – everything is the short answer. ( Think knowledge compression=better answers.)

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