Data visualisation has been undergoing a renaissance in the last few years.

Whether it’s Understanding the Financial Crisis in Less Than 3 Minutes or untangling The Truth about HIV, representing information visually is a great way to break down complex information into more palatable chunks.

Visualisations also engage audiences who might otherwise have been put off the more traditional table or pie chart.

Last year the BBC commissioned these breath-taking works to accompany their series Britain from Above:

What I find compelling about data visualisation is that it steps back from the detail of the information. It allows relationships and patterns within complex data to be recognised.

Take this example from Nathan Yau at Flowing Data:

Here Nathan uses data from Twitter to demonstrate the optimism felt on the day of Barak Obama's inauguration.

It displays only tweets with a 'positive attitude', and while the output is seemingly simplistic, I am still mesmerized watching the 24-hour period of positivity blooming out across the world.  

Another fabulous example using Twitter is this piece from Jer Thorp:

The application looks for Tweets containing the phrases 'just landed in...' or 'just arrived in...' over a 36-hour period.  

Both are great examples of how data can be used to weave a narrative around an event or set of statistics.

I think one of the strongest aspects of The Suite Spot installation (that Click Suite created for Webstock), was the real sense it gave you as to the mood and feeling of conference as it happened, even if you were unable to attend yourself.

I’ve only really scratched the surface on these new ways of interpreting and exploring information.

If you enjoy a good set of data yourself (and, frankly, who doesn’t?) I urge you to delve into the following sites:

Information Aesthetics
Flowing Data
Visual Complexity
Data Visualization

And one of my personal favourites, the beautiful work of Jonathan Harris.