Metification

Data visualisation has a long history in science. For example, the concept of acceleration can be visualised by plotting the relation between time and distance, and it is quite possible that many of the formula's that model fundamental physical relationships have been "inferred" from plotting experimental data.

Today, data visualisation is a powerful tool in various areas. It is frequently used in the finance industry (e.g. technical analysis to detect trends) and slowly making an impact in sports reporting. A striking example of the latter is drawing a virtual "red line" in a live television broadcast on ski jumping, where passing the "red line" would mean that the ski jumper would take first place.

An interesting question is whether visualisation would also be useful to "knowledge workers". In the social sciences the traditional techniques from science (line, column and scatter charts) have been used to turn numbers into pictures. If these charts relate a variable over time it becomes possible to detect trends, otherwise the underlying data is probably more useful than the charts.

The use of colour has been a recent enhancement to data visualisation. My first exposure to it was an issue of Scientific American some 20 years ago in which a "radio picture" of space was visualised using colours. Colour also appears an attractive dimension for knowledge workers. An example is the following image.

This is from KM Quest, a game to learn Knowledge Management. Without going into detail, the image depicts green areas that are "save" and red areas that are "dangerous" and need attention of the knowledge manager. For me, this is a very good example of visualising information (or data) that cannot be formalised in the sense of traditional science. And for the average knowlegde worker images like this might be more informative than the proverbial 1000 words.

Knowledge workers have invented many additional visualisations to convey their understanding of a certain subject matter. Examples are diagrams in which boxes of various shapes are connected by arrows, and indentation (or tree like visualisations) to convey the idea of whole/part and sub/super relationships. Normally, such visualisations are presented as "factual".

So, what is "metification"? Metification is the idea of taking a set of data resulting from a knowledge worker and representing it such that it stimulates new ideas or insights. The term "metification" originates from "meta-ideas" which got contracted to "meti".

Metify!

Comments

[Lilia]

Anjo,

you may be inetersted to read this one: "Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments", http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640109aabs.htm

It's about effects of e-mail contacts visualisations over time on recalling stories and sharing them with others. It confirms that visualisations are useful (at least ;) for the networking part of KM.