Oh yeah, I know. I wouldn’t do a doctorate to improve my career prospects, it would be purely a personal thing. Which is why I doubt I’ll ever get around to it.
If I win the lottery tomorrow then yeah, I think I would do a doctorate, but that’s not likely to happen either lol
I agree, with this but there will always be designers on the team that produces this software. I’m not planning on putting all my eggs in that basket though and hoping to become one of the designers on one of these teams, although admittedly that would be ideal.
I just think with a design background having a masters in data visualisation, could potentially lead to more work in the long-term. I wouldn’t just have knowledge on the visual side of it, but the subject as a whole. It could lead to consultancy work and who knows what else.
After hounding a number of academics all over the country over the last few days, I have got a better idea of how this might work out for me.
I have spoken to a statistician professor, who says that his students are great with the analytical side of it, but when it comes to the aesthetics, they are clueless… as we would expect.
I have also spoken to a Graphic Design lecturer who also has a doctorate in a related subject and he thinks its a good avenue to explore as he feels many designers tend to shy away from Data Vis.
These people, as well as the guy who started the digital agency from scratch and who gave me the idea in the first place, all seem very positive about my doing a masters in this subject. The guy who gave me the idea also happens to be my best client. So when I finish the masters, guess who I’m calling for work first lol.
It’s a specialist area I know, but I feel quite positive about it. It’s an area of growth, it can’t hurt to be a master in that area.
I wrote this in a rush so I hope I’m making sense. I appreciate all the replies, as always.
The reason for my lengthy and tedious posts on this subject were because I’m also very involved with the subject and have been sort of preoccupied with it over the past several months.
I agree with what you’re saying and totally agree there are opportunities there if one approaches it from a bigger-picture direction. This being a graphic design forum, I just wanted to mention that these opportunities require thinking past just graphic design, which you seem to also realize.
I am struggling to come up with a particular area to focus on. I need to get a rough proposal to the head of the media art and design masters department by Friday.
I need to identify a problem in data visualisation and base my proposal question on that problem.
One idea I had was focusing on how people already produce a ridiculous amount of data every day through the use of various apps and services, and how that is going to increase over time. I would then talk about how we make sense of that data, and how we present it visually.
There is already a ridiculous amount of data, but there is going to be even more and how that will affect things. I don’t know it seems a bit rubbish now I’m writing it out and telling other people lol
Can any of you clever people on here think of any problem that faces data visualisation in the future?
I really appreciate your input B! You seem to know a lot more about it than I do at the moment so I welcome the lengthy posts lol.
Thanks.
Wouldn’t it be sweet if the internet were replaced by something better?
It’s the 21st century and we’re still relying on wires strung on wooden poles.
The internet is more of a software technology than a hardware technology. It could be completely wireless and still work the same way. It’s mostly based on TCP/IP, which is a language. The only way that would change would be to develop a different language.
Data visualization is a more specific form of infographics, the broader category.
I’m being pedantic, but TCP/IP is a set of protocols for transmitting data across the internet — not really a language.
To clarify, I use the word “language” to describe any information format of communicating whether it’s between a person and another person, between a person and another machine, between a machine and another machine, or within components of a machine.
This was in response to PD, only to demonstrate why it doesn’t matter whether the internet signal is transmitted via wires or wireless.
I agree it’s not a hand coding language. It’s a format that can transmit multiple coding languages over the internet. An alphabet is not a language either, but it’s a component of a language. Just as a person cannot read text without knowing what the symbols in the alphabet mean, a machine can’t communicate via the internet unless it interprets TCP/IP. There are thousands of machines that send and receive digital data that do not interpret TCP/IP.
I know that the alphabet is not the best example because digital machines only know 2 symbols, 1 and 0. It’s probably more accurate to compare TCP/IP to the punctuation and grammar of a language.
Or maybe a language can be compared to what you need know to drive a particular car. Whereas a protocol might be compared to the rules of the road that enable you to sucessfully drive that car on the highway.
When you think about it, the beginning and end of a packet functions the same way to machines that a hyphen functions to humans. The end of transmission is the same function of a period.
Take a look at https://www.jstor.org/.
It provides summaries of articles written for academic journals. You won’t be able to read the full articles unless you are enrolled at a member institution, but the abstracts may give you an idea of the types of things people are working on in the field.
Thanks Mojo, I’ll take a look.
I’d have a more difficult time thinking of what kind of statistical data whose significance couldn’t be better recognized and understood through data visualization. I don’t think your problem is in coming up with problems as it is in how best to narrow them down to something a little more manageable.
You’re right there, that is exactly what I’m having trouble with.
It’s how you frame the question, I’m going to end up covering a lot during the course, but they (the university) want a concise problem you plan on focusing on, for the purposes of the proposal.
They have told me they know it’s going to change as the course goes on, so why do they place so much importance on getting it narrowed down in the first place.
Another long response — sorry. I know I tend to annoy some people.
I’m in the US, and things work a bit differently in the UK. But here, a graduate student will find the same kinds of mandates about focusing and narrowing things down to a more well-defined course of study from one’s graduate committee in gaining approval on a thesis or dissertation. It’s just the reality of many research-based graduate programs where students are doing more self-directed exploration than sitting in a classroom memorizing things.
The whole point, from my perspective, is to force the student to dig deep and narrow, challenge his or her assumptions, turn over every stone and explore all sides of the issue in ways that are specific enough to be original, innovative, defensible and genuinely meaningful in ways that push the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. At the completion of the program, a graduate student is expected to be a foremost authority on his or her specific subject and to convincingly argue and successfully defend every contention reached in the thesis and back it up with research.
For now, you might want to think of your decision as results of exploring a hierarchy of sorts. First, you might decide what interests you about data visualization. Then, depending on your answer, break that down into possibilities, then pick one of those possibilities, ask yourself questions, then do it again and again until you’ve narrowed it down enough to not be too broad. While working through this series of increasingly specific questions to yourself, make your decisions based on a combination of your personal interests and their potential for research and drawing meaningful and original conclusions.
For example, just off the top of my head…
I’m not at all suggesting that this is a logical sequence of choices for you. Maybe you really want to focus on graphics or statistics or methodologies or whatever. It’s really up to you and your graduate program.
I’m just suggesting that it might help to approach making your decision in a sequential way with each successive question being a range of possibilites that stem from your answer to your previous question. If you’re going to spend two years deeply immersed in graduate research, it better be something you find interesting and suitable for research and forming logic-based opinions that can be backed by that research.
By the way, have you ever read any of Edward Tufte’s books? They’re largely pre-digital and deal with the display of, primarily, analog data, but they’re still great books for anyone interested in data visualization. Specifically, the book titled, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, was nothing short of a total game changer when it was released in the early '80s.
A few weeks ago, I also ran across this doctoral dissertation on the subject that might stimulate some thoughts: http://benfry.com/phd/dissertation/
Hans Rosling has several TED talks and they are all mind blowing. If you’re interested in Data Visualisation, check this out:
Thanks everyone, I’m in a super rush today trying to get this sorted out so will respond properly to each post later.
I have this potential research question below, which I’m considering.
Question: How does data visualisation as a medium of communication affect how a message is perceived by the end user?
For this question, I would consider how different graphical elements, affect how data is perceived by the audience, and whether this makes it hard to objectively judge data communicated in this manner.
This question relates to Marshall McLuhan’s theory on the medium is the message. I’m a big fan of McLuhan so it is an area that will keep my interest for the duration of the course.
I’m concerned it may be a little broad though and maybe I need to narrow it down.
Does anybody have any thoughts, please?
There is only so much bandwidth on “wireless” communications as well.
Radio waves and telephone poles.
Do better.
As for the language, the code, you need to make something unbreakable.
Kinda like why do we still build houses out of wood, have rooflines designed to leak, and roads that need to be repaved every 5 years.