TedTalk on Visualizing Humanity

      I’m going to start off slightly off topic; am I the only one who was overcome by an urge to draw a sheep while listening to Johnny Cash after watching the video? That may not be entirely off topic, those are two of the projects that were shown in the video, and I found them to be very interesting. At first I did wonder “why do I have to watch this, what do time lapses of flight patterns have to do with defining humanity?” But after a minute I sat back in my chair and thought, “actually, these are really cool looking, and they do show a lot about humanity this age.” The flight time lapses and the international communication visualization aren’t just graphed out data. They could be, the creator could have put the data out on a spread sheet or even mapped out the flights on a globe, but these visualizations aren’t just mapped data, they are works of art. The take the raw map of flights and present them in a very abstract and appealing way to make themselves interesting. They are not about showing the different types of flights to and from different airports anymore, they are about showing the fluidity of the people travelling, and presenting that in a similarly fluid manner so that people will enjoy interacting with it and learning more about how different people on different flights to different places for different purposes all go about their business in the same space using the same mode of transportation on the same day. In a way that is similar to the other projects the speaker presented, on the draw a sheep, draw a frame for a music video; repeat a note in Daisy Bell, etc. Completely different people are asked to do the same exact thing and come up with entirely different products. When the directions are as simple as “draw a sheep facing left” there is a world of different ways to draw the sheep and every person that came on to draw a sheep picked a different way. That really shows our individuality as humans, asked to do one simple thing and we come up with everything from a photorealistic scene of a sheep standing in a field to a written question asking why we were doing this.