What happens in your brain when you read a map or untangle the meaning of a new word? A complex and rapid process of interpreting environmental stimuli, signals, and context clues from the world around you. Let’s talk more about how we understand the meaning of new words. You are a few paragraphs into an article and BAM, a word…
What are some of the most common data visualizations you see in newspapers, textbooks, and corporate annual reports? Graphs showing a country’s GDP growth trends or charts capturing a company’s sales growth in the last 4 quarters would be high up on the list. Essentially, these are visualizations that track time series data — the performance of an indicator over…
Weren’t all of us in our early childhood fascinated by how maps could carry us to faraway continents, countries, rivers, mountains, and oceans? The way we see the world today is largely shaped by the images of physical and political maps that we pored over in our school atlases. In the age of data explosion, mammoth data sets are being…
Data visualization is a great way to represent huge amounts of data in a simple and intuitive fashion. All data visualizations have the same goal: help viewers easily grasp information to make quick inferences or decisions. However, it is important that visualizations are not overdone and hit the sweet spot where they are catchy, informative, and easy to navigate. This…
Whether you are looking to improve your business performance or measure the effectiveness of policy decisions or simply enhance processes in your organization, choosing and tracking the right metrics is vital. This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are extremely useful. At Atlan, we have had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of high-level decision makers who look…
If a picture is worth thousand words, then what about a neat data visualization? Displaying information in graphics to generate better insights is not a new phenomenon, but, with the advent of technology and increased access to data, it has become far more prominent. Once restricted to analysis of economics, finance, and science, data visualization has emerged as an industry…