Be the Data

• Visual Analytics

| August 4, 2014

Be the Data is an embodied approach to visual analytics  designed for teaching abstract data analytics concepts to students. In particular, it addresses the problem of exploring alternative projections of high-dimensional data points using interactive dimension reduction techniques.

In Be the Data, each student in a physical space, embodies a data point in a dataset. The coordinates of students in the physical space represent a 2D projection of the high-dimensional data. Students can explore alternative projections by physically moving themselves, and hence the corresponding data points, in the space. Therefore, students can pose hypotheses about the data and further explore and understand it.