(cross-post from Attestation Update)
I’ve been interested lately in creative ways to show data. We accountants are great at absorbing a lot of numbers and finding the patterns. Other people who don’t have our mind-set can not see what we see. We need to find new ways to explain things.
How would you summarize the location and intensity of wars over the last several centuries? One of my favorite historians would do that verbally over the course of a full-length book or a dozen columns. (And I’d love every word of it too!)
Jordi Colomer has done so in a 5 minute video:
Ever Battle In The World Over The Last 1000 Years.
The video is fantastic. The only comment I have is there aren’t enough battles shown for the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. I say that as a compliment. Hear my point again, a video that covers all major battles of 1000 years could be refined in an area where I have a modest amount of knowledge. What a tiny comment! The video is great.
I digress. This is an example of the kind of visualization we CPAs, engineers, doctors, teachers, chemists, professors, mathematicians, etc. need to get our arms around. We need to grasp hold of this technique in order to communicate our data faster, better, and with more intellectual and emotional buy-in to the story that is behind the numbers.