- So right now, you might be learning about bar graphs
and line graphs and thinking,
"When am I ever gonna use this again?"
Well, as a scientist, I use bar graphs
and line graphs all the time.
The graphs that you're learning in your classes right now
are the graphs that scientists still use.
They're using bar graphs to explain their data
at scientific conferences,
they're using it for their academic publications,
and they're using knowledge that they probably learned
back when they were in junior high
and learning about bar graphs.
- Data visualizations are not only just useful
for communicating information to others,
it's also useful for helping us make sense
of what's happening too.
It's important to kind of dispel this kind of misconception
a lot of people have about science
and about how it's a kind of super linear process, right?
Like you have a question, you do some stuff,
and you automatically come to an answer.
That turns out, that's not really how science works at all.
What we do is once we have all this data,
we visualize it, right?
Like we create bar plots, y'know,
we create histograms, we create line plots
and all these kinds of things.
And it turns out that once we look at our own data,
that generates new questions for us, right?
We see that, "Huh, okay, we weren't expecting
a result like this."
And then we run more experiments.