PopculturAL blog merges with Auckland Libraries blog

Just a brief note to let you all know that our popculturAL blog has now merged with the new Auckland Libraries blog.

If you subscribe to popculturAL, then I encourage you to change your subscription over to Auckland Libraries blog to be sure of being kept up to date with Auckland Libraries pop cultural happenings, and to learn more about our collections and news.

Other blogs joining us at Auckland Libraries blog include All things musical and Books in the City.
Now these blogs will be together on the Auckland Libraries blogspot - so don't forget to subscribe to keep up to date!

See you there!

How to make complex things much simpler

I like big numbers. I like colourful graphs. I like maps. I like complex data sets.

Most of all, I *really* like beautiful visual representations of information.

So imagine my absolute delight to find a new book full of visual representations of data sets that *almost* knocks David McCandless' books off my number one spot of "awesome books to spend hours poring over".

Managing increasingly large & complex data sets is a challenge facing today's society, and how to make sense of, and then communicate the meaning of, that information is becoming increasingly important. Government spending data, local health data, global traffic patterns - all big data sets that need to be analyzed and interpreted.

One solution is to take those big numbers, interpret the information and create a visual layout of that data so that it can be understood more clearly by the non-statisticians amongst us (aka most of the adult population).

Albert Einstein is credited with saying "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." So why not take all those numbers and turn them into pictures? Simple. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe a picture is also worth a thousand (or more) numbers.

The book that I am currently spending far too many waking hours engrossed in is Information Graphics, published by Taschen. This book shows that people can, and will, understand information if it is visually well-interpreted. It is beautiful. It is big. It is fascinating. I promise to return it by its due date so that you can share in the fun! In the meantime, take a sneak peak into the book here.