Kim Rees
Periscopic
Living, Breathing Data

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Data doesn't exist on its own. It doesn't merely happen. There's a life to data--a living, breathing journey that happens which takes data from its source and abstracts it. The end result being to put it into rows and columns.

Unfortunately, this ultimately dehumanizes the data and allows us to focus on an abstract representation of real life places, people, and nature. This may seem okay because there are tools that are built specifically for us to do this sort of thing.

We need to find a connection back through all this data. We need to use data as a looking glass to transport us into the meaning of it all. This is about how to get there.

Kim Rees is co-founder of Periscopic, a socially-responsible data visualization firm. A prominent individual in the data visualization community, Kim has presented at Visualized, Strata, OSCON, VisWeek, and Wolfram Data Summit among others. She is an advisor to the US Congressional Budget Office and is a guest blogger for Infosthetics and FlowingData.