INF506 Social Networking for Information Professionals ~ OLJ: Free-writing: Infographics

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. Information graphics surround us for a long time. We commonly see infographics in newspaper to show the weather, as well as maps and site plans, and graphs for statistical data etc. Further to the study of INF506, I found that infographics are commonly used on web and there are free online tools to generate infographics.

I think infographics are commonly used todays because people can present complex information quickly and clearly in graphics which represent/communicate concepts using a single symbol to process information. Previously, information graphics are used heavily in children’s books of visualized goodness but now we can get concepts by infograhics. Here I show examples of visualized concepts below.

Pinterest [Infographic]

I know Delicious but there is another social bookmarking site “Pinterest” for a year but I have lack of knowledge on using it (I don’t have Pinterest account). Then I conduct the web search and try to learn quickly about Pinterest. It’s great to retrieve many infographics to represent “Pinterest”. It is interesting to learn new things by graphics. When you click “source” provided in the infographic, you may direct to the original article to read the text and the image. For example, you may click “source” on the bottom of the attached [infographic] that will redirect you to “A guide to use Pinterest for business [Inforgraphic].

Source: A guide to use Pinterest for business [Inforgraphic]

Internet [Infographic]

There is another example shows the user of infographic. Internet, is a worldwide network of computers, which is made of a lot of different components: Websites users, services, browser, networking cables…It is hard to conceptualize the component of internet. Even some of them are physical component but some of them do not.“Mapping the internet” demonstrates the visual representation of Internet by Infographic.

Source: http://www.sysctl.org/rootzmap/e-map.jpg

Education [Infographic]

It seems that “Infographic” can represent different topics. Dunn (2012) have been saving up all of his favorite infographics and picked each infographic based on the topic. Let’s see the visualized concepts of education represented by infographics.

The above of three examples demonstrated the use of infographics which can represent information in visualization and post on social networking tools to increase the attractiveness of the content. Infographics on education may help teaching and learning, as well as enhance the interactive and attractiveness on education. Here is an interesting information graphic shows the history of education.