# Seeing the Big Picture (GoGaRuCo 13)

> Last updated: 2013-09-20

Data is a hot buzz word in the industry. Every day there are more
startups with “Big Data” somewhere in their elevator pitch. There are
dozens of devices to record how we sleep, what we eat, how much we
exercise, even how often we breathe. Every action we take online
generates data that is stored and analyzed.

Understanding all this data can be difficult. Humans aren’t designed
to see patterns in thousands of lines of json or XML. We are good at
seeing patterns in pictures, graphs, diagrams, and spots in the
underbrush.

Often a simple visualization is what you need to understand a
problem. In this talk, I’ll demonstrate tools that you can use to
quickly generate “back-of-the-envelope” visualizations from a variety
of data sets.

[Slides](../../../../files/dataviz_gogaruco_13.pdf)

[Code](https://github.com/thagomizer/data_visualization_talk)