[More live blogging from Gemma from the MCN 2010 conference, ‘I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In’ in Austin, Texas, to help MCGers keep up with the news and exciting research being shared at the conference.]

THATcamp unconference session-  Visualizing Museum Collections

The wiki for this theme is Museumviz.pbworks.com and examples of visualisation can be found on Museumpipes.wordpress.com

Visualisations of data give a snapshot view, which you can drill down into for data analysis.
Some examples we looked at included a visualisation to show relative size of objects.  And another mashed data from a collection and the New York times, where it mentions artists.  In the resulting social network graph you could sometimes see links between artists you may not have known of.  

When working with collections data you can use visualisations as a diagnostic tool to get an idea of your messy data because you can see its anomalies.

Another application using collections data would be to find out which objects do not fit in with your collections policy or the rest of your collection and could be more easily identified during rationalisation projects.