Modeling. Munging and Story Telling

A nice post on the Dataspora blog takes off from a comment by Hal Varian to explain why the uber geek skills of people who understand how to use data well are becoming more valuable in our society. These are people who can figure out what is significant and what not in a conceptual area, who can clean up real life data streams and put them in a form that quantitative analysis can be brought to bear, and who can figure ways to communicate the knowledge that they have derived from analysis of the data to others. The author focuses on the term "visualization" but he is perhaps a visually oriented person. I am not, an and I greatly value story telling in words (which the author of the Dataspora post does quite well.) I suspect that in the not too distant future, we will use other modalities for communication A video is visual, but how about if we add useful sound to the visual data, including perhaps rhythm and pitch. How about presenting data to other senses -- touch, propriceptive, taste?

Note however, how much he can do with images and color: