Article: Data art or science? Your best shot

As a social studies teacher I am always working to help students be able to read maps - but that must transend to allow students to be able to understand visuals. The use of visuals is only increasing in our Internet driven world - the ability to create visuals is easier. Plus, in all aspects of life people want to incorporate data to prove their point - and visual data is easier to understand and to justify an argument or highlight an insight. Finding examples that are of interest to students can be difficult but this article, "Data art or science? Your best shot," provides an example many of my students would enjoy.

This article explores "THE world of data visualisations is undergoing such a revolution, due to the avalanche of information and sleek presentation software, that it has opened up a vibrant debate as to what sorts of infographics are useful and revealing versus just a bunch of pretty pictures. The New York Times has just published a terrific graphic related to basketball that does an excellent job of sharpening the debate. It produced a heat map of a court to plot the number of shots on the basket between two teams in the NBA playoffs, the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder."

This chart is from Game 1 of the NBA Finals.