The Human Side of Big Data and Modern Data Storytelling

Today, we’re starting a new series on our blog, where we’ll be featuring cream-of-the-crop articles from across the Internet on a weekly basis to inspire, provoke, entertain, and inform you on the state of data visualization. We hope you’ll find this series relevant, and useful. Do subscribe to our blog to get these delivered right to your inbox every week.

Product: Recommind’s Hypergraph helps lawyers sift big data for hidden connections

One of the interesting applications of Big data is the ability to visualize unstructured data like text content. Hypergraph is leveraging this capability to find and highlight hidden connections between people, documents, messages and other elements within an organization. Business executives may find this an interesting way to spot opportunities and trending ideas within their organizations via their intranet and internal communications. Does it border on being intrusive?

Product: Sift Science Uses Machine Learning to Weed Out Credit Card Fraud

Built on the idea of empowering online businesses to fight credit card fraud at relatively lower costs that an enterprise, Sift Science is using data and statistics to catch fraudsters before damage is done. They talk about how this is only possible now with tools like Hbase and Hadoop. They go into details about some of the rules they use to predict risk in transactions, and is a good read for anyone working with data modeling and statistics, and for product managers.

Visualization: Five Tips for Painting a Clearer Marketing Ops Picture With Data Visualization

Marketing-specific, but has take-aways for anyone interested in data visualization. I particularly liked their visualization of Sales Leads in the form of bubble charts with four dimensions of data. Sounds confusing? Just spend a few minutes observing the efficacy of this bubble chart, and you’ll get it.

Book: The Human Face of Big Data: An Interview with Rick Smolan

Rick Smolan, author of ‘The Human Face of Big Data’ discusses the motivation behind his book, and earlier experiments that explore the intersection of data and humanity. He gives examples of how data is being used to cut electricity consumption at home, and even save lives by predicting the possibility a repeat heart attack happening in patients. It’s an inspiring and though-provoking read on the potential data has to change the way we live.

To start your weekend on a high, here’s a video about ‘The Human Face of Big Data’