Goodman uses visualization as an exploratory technique in her efforts to understand interstellar gas—the stuff of which stars are born. “The data volume is not a concern,” she says; even though a big telescope can capture a petabyte of data in a night, astronomers have a long history of dealing with large quantities of data. The trick, she says, is making sense of it all. Data visualizations can lead to new insights, she says, because “humans are much better at pattern recognition” than computers. In a recent presentation, she showed how a three-dimensional visualization of a cloud of gas in interstellar space had led to the discovery of a previously unknown cloud structure. She will often work by moving from a visualization back to math, and then back to another visualization.
Read More: https://harvardmagazine.com/2014/03/why-big-data-is-a-big-deal