Maya Abrams
Bio
DTX/MIA | a sophomore in college who just likes to display her thoughts & ideas for others to view/discuss. that's all i got for now.
Twitter: _mayadania
Instagram: _mayaabrams
Stories (4)
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Data Visualization Article Response: How Alternative Facts Rewrite History
This week's reading for my 'Introduction to Illustration & Data Visualizations' class is an article by Alan Smith titled "How alternative facts rewrite history," specializing in the importance of a graphic's scaling used to encode significant periods for the reader's understanding. According to Smith the definition of scale is 'the mechanism by which numbers of any size are converted into readable proportions on the page or screen,' meaning the barriers that will emphasize how and where numerically/historically the graphic will be measured. One crucial notion Smith highlights in terms of using scale correctly is making sure that all graphics use the same units, concerning what timespan will be measured to keep from misleading information. Alan's article shows an emphasis on a particular style of scale called the log scale, which is used to balance higher and lower values of the same data on an axis.
By Maya Abrams6 years ago in 01
The Functional Art:Introduction & Chapter 1 Response
This week's reading for my 'Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization' class were the Introduction and 1st chapter to Alberto Cairo's The Fuctional Art. The book's introduction explains four major themes concerning using infographics correctly. Some of these themes include proclamations like how 'The brain doesn't process info that comes through the eyes, but creates mental images that allow us to reason actions that facilitate survival' or that 'Graphics, charts, and maps aren't just tools to be seen, but to be read and scrutinized.' The two chapters also explain the foundations to using infographics as an operating work of art by using their visuals to communicate the systematic facts found in another intellectual's research. The main reason many publications, authors, and scientists, and specialists in academia use infographics to visualize their theories consists of the basic fact that visuals with a satisfactory summarization facilitate the mind better learn a new idea or theory. Cairo includes a chart in The Functional Art's first chapter depicting the process of an image transitioning to basic, uninterpreted info into knowledge into wisdom, relating how data visualization is a crucial method to speed up this process in tandem with the data's original results. The most intersting tidbit I received from the reading is when Cairo explained towards the end of the first chapter that, "the role of an info architecht is to anticipaate the process and generate order before people's brains try to do it on their own." Basically, info designers use their work to accelerate the brain's decoding of factual information, rather than letting the reader decode it based off their personal opinion. It helps provide an objective opinion, if used correctly, to the research without having to fight through using objective language.
By Maya Abrams6 years ago in Journal
How Charts Lie: Introduction and Chapter 1 Response
This semester I decided to take a class titled 'Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization,' which specializes in interpreting and creating infographics to accompany educational projects or articles. The first reading for the class is titled How Charts Lie by Alberto Cairo, and the main idea of the book is explaining how political, public, and general figures either intentionally or unintentionally misread charted graphics for their personal gain. The book's introduction begins with several graphics illustrated from the 2016 Presidential Election, including this controversial image of the Electoral College votes. The key reason for bringing up the election concerned the fact that President Trump and his colleagues tend to falsify the actual results from the election, using misleading charts to convince the American people that they won by a landslide. In reality they actually lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, and only won the election via the electoral college where the states with the higher number of representatives voted in his favor. Cairo further explains throughout the remainder of the introduction into the first chapter how it's immensely important that people in such a technical world have a clear sense of graphicacy (graphic literacy), meaning that they can correctly interpret the thousands of charts found around news media daily. Another notion Cairo mentions to help facilitate chart interpretation is making sure that the artists make regional proportions correct to their statistics; this means that if a city, like Miami, FL, has a population of 2.7 million people, while a city, like Los Angeles, CA, has a population of 10 million people, the graphic depicting LA should be nearly four times the size of Miami's representative graphic.
By Maya Abrams6 years ago in Education
Maya's Tenfold Tunes: 01/19
As I constantly find myself narrating life's events to an unintentional soundtrack every month of each year, I quickly realized that others probably have as well! It's easy to connect certain songs to particular past memories. With this key notion in mind, I thought it would be fun to rank my ten most played songs from each month from least to most favorite! I will give brief summaries containing my favorite lyrics, musical dynamics, and production characteristics of each song below. If you're intrigued by any of the details listed, I also made sure to include each artist's website, social media, a direct link to the track, and whichever album/single the song was released. Since I decided to only post cover art rather than a video link, I wanted to clarify that these songs are available on all major streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify, TIDAL, Pandora, Youtube, etc.). I hope you enjoy!
By Maya Abrams7 years ago in Beat
