By Luis Landa
I had to recently do a lecture for the class Navigating Complexity and the topic was visualisations. Since I was going to use a lot of examples that showcase the diverse uses, messages, and possibilities of visualisations, I tried to google “visualisations” which of course resulted in an endless sight of bar charts, line charts, pie charts and dashboards. It was pretty clear that I would have to do my own research and navigate an overabundance of examples/tutorials of the aftermath of the 2010s rise and stay of the data deluge. I found quite a few nice examples in my own research, but these were often of topics I knew, finding new ones proved a bit more difficult as it takes a bit to also understand the context and historical/political angle of the visualisation.
So, I was having a harder time than usual but lo and behold, turns out Ethos’ physical library had 3 different books about visualisations that massively helped me in preparing the lecture! They showed me a lot of incredibly beautiful and engrossing visualisations and generally made the search so much easier. Luckily, I will get to be around this wonderful library a lot more since I started working as Lab Assistant Technologist on the 1st of October. I’m really excited about it and it seems like I will learn a lot in the coming year which is very exciting. It also means spending a lot more time with the nice people at the lab which is always nice! I am looking forward to show you the next steps of the solar server and also generally be around and working on new things.
I hope to see you around during the opening hours and also hope to show you what I will be working on through the blog.