data d'Pender

Since my transition from full-time business analytics back into biodiversity informatics, I've accumulated a few thoughts on the subtle, albeit major, differences in challenges posed by data visualization. Big data continues to pile up in every domain. While scientists have long collected and presented large sets of data as part of their research pipeline, new players are entering the data deluge realm. From small online companies to monolithic technology companies (e.g.,  Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) , many businesses are now clients of easy-to-use visualization tools that take data directly from its data store to beautiful live dashboards or linked stories (e.g., Tableau, Looker, Google Analytics). These are the sorts of tools I used as an analyst in the private sector. More available visualization tools can only mean good things for scientists, right? The differences between scientific datasets, data visualization goals and audiences and the visualization goals an