from information overload or data glut.

And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that,

and that's using our eyes more.

So, visualizing information, so that we can see

the patterns and connections that matter

and then designing that information so it makes more sense,

or it tells a story,

or allows us to focus only on the information that's important.

Failing that, visualized information can just look really cool.

So, let's see.

This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram,

and this image arose

out of frustration I had

with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press.

That is, they're meaningless without context:

500 billion for this pipeline,

20 billion for this war.

It doesn't make any sense, so the only way to understand it

is visually and relatively.

So I scraped a load of reported figures

from various news outlets

and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts.

And the colors here represent the motivation behind the money.

So purple is "fighting,"

and red is "giving money away," and green is "profiteering."

And what you can see straight away

is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers.

You can literally see them.

But more importantly, you start to see

patterns and connections between numbers

that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

Let me point out some that I really like.

This is OPEC's revenue, this green box here --

780 billion a year.

And this little pixel in the corner -- three billion --

that's their climate change fund.

Americans, incredibly generous people --

over 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year,

compared with the amount of foreign aid

given by the top 17 industrialized nations

at 120 billion.

Then of course,

the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion

back in 2003.

And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now

to 3,000 billion.

So now it's great

because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well.

So we could say, well, a new figure comes out ... let's see African debt.

How much of this diagram do you think might be taken up

by the debt that Africa owes to the West?

Let's take a look.

So there it is:

227 billion is what Africa owes.

And the recent financial crisis,

how much of this diagram might that figure take up?

What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that.

Dooosh -- Which I think is the appropriate sound effect

for that much money:

11,900 billion.

So, by visualizing this information,

we turned it into a landscape

that you can explore with your eyes,

a kind of map really, a sort of information map.

And when you're lost in information,

an information map is kind of useful.

So I want to show you another landscape now.

We need to imagine what a landscape

of the world's fears might look like.

Let's take a look.

This is Mountains Out of Molehills,

a timeline of global media panic.

(Laughter)

So, I'll label this for you in a second.

But the height here, I want to point out,

is the intensity of certain fears

as reported in the media.

Let me point them out.

So this, swine flu -- pink.

Bird flu.

SARS -- brownish here. Remember that one?

The millennium bug,

terrible disaster.

These little green peaks

are asteroid collisions.

(Laughter)

And in summer, here, killer wasps.

(Laughter)

So these are what our fears look like

over time in our media.

But what I love -- and I'm a journalist --

and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data

that you can only see when you visualize it.

Let me highlight it for you.

See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games.

As you can see, there's a kind of odd, regular pattern in the data,

twin peaks every year.

If we look closer, we see those peaks occur

at the same month every year.

Why?

Well, November, Christmas video games come out,

and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content.

But April isn't a particularly massive month

for video games.

Why April?

Well, in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting,

and since then, that fear

has been remembered by the media

and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year.

You have retrospectives, anniversaries,

court cases, even copy-cat shootings,

all pushing that fear into the agenda.

And there's another pattern here as well. Can you spot it?

See that gap there? There's a gap,

and it affects all the other stories.

Why is there a gap there?

You see where it starts? September 2001,

when we had something very real

to be scared about.

So, I've been working as a data journalist for about a year,

and I keep hearing a phrase

all the time, which is this:

"Data is the new oil."

Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource

that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights,

and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily.

It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times,

especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico,

but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly,

and I would say that data is the new soil.

Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium.

Over the years, online,

we've laid down

a huge amount of information and data,

and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity,

and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

And, all right, I'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit.

But it's a really fertile medium,

and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations,

they feel like flowers blooming from this medium.

But if you look at it directly,

it's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts.

But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way,

interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed.

Let me show you this.

Can you guess what this data set is?

What rises twice a year,

once in Easter

and then two weeks before Christmas,

has a mini peak every Monday,

and then flattens out over the summer?

I'll take answers.

(Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate.

You might want to get some chocolate in.

Any other guesses?

(Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping.

Yeah, retail therapy might help.

(Audience: Sick leave.)

DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off.

Shall we see?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself,

we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates

for the phrase "break-up" and "broken-up"

and this is the pattern we found --

people clearing out for Spring Break,

(Laughter)

coming out of very bad weekends on a Monday,

being single over the summer,

and then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day.

Who would do that?

So there's a titanic amount of data out there now,

unprecedented.

But if you ask the right kind of question,

or you work it in the right kind of way,

interesting things can emerge.

So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful.

I wonder if I could make my life beautiful.

And here's my visual C.V.

I'm not quite sure I've succeeded.

Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great.

But I wanted to convey something to you.

I started as a programmer,

and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years,

in print, online and then in advertising,

and only recently have I started designing.

And I've never been to design school.

I've never studied art or anything.

I just kind of learned through doing.

And when I started designing,

I discovered an odd thing about myself.

I already knew how to design,

but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it,

but more like I was sensitive

to the ideas of grids and space

and alignment and typography.

It's almost like being exposed

to all this media over the years

had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me.

And I don't feel like I'm unique.

I feel that everyday, all of us now

are being blasted by information design.

It's being poured into our eyes through the Web,

and we're all visualizers now;

we're all demanding a visual aspect

to our information.

There's something almost quite magical about visual information.

It's effortless, it literally pours in.

And if you're navigating a dense information jungle,

coming across a beautiful graphic

or a lovely data visualization,

it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle.

I was curious about this, so it led me

to the work of a Danish physicist

called Tor Norretranders,

and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms.

So here we go. This is your senses,

pouring into your senses every second.

Your sense of sight is the fastest.

It has the same bandwidth as a computer network.

Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key.

And then you have hearing and smell,

which has the throughput of a hard disk.

And then you have poor old taste,

which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator.

And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent,

that's the amount we're actually aware of.

So a lot of your vision --

the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in.

It's unconscious.

The eye is exquisitely sensitive

to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern.

It loves them, and it calls them beautiful.

It's the language of the eye.

If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind,

which is about words and numbers and concepts,

you start speaking two languages simultaneously,

each enhancing the other.

So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts.

And that whole thing -- it's two languages

both working at the same time.

So we can use this new kind of language, if you like,

to alter our perspective or change our views.

Let me ask you a simple question

with a really simple answer:

Who has the biggest military budget?

It's got to be America, right?

Massive. 609 billion in 2008 --

607, rather.