astronomy

Visual.ly

Visual.ly is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Visual.ly rather than just read about it. In short: Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics. It was founded by Stew Langille, Lee Sherman, Tal Siach, and Adam Breckler in 2011.

Key takeaways

Visual.ly belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Visual.ly to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Visual.ly from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics. It was founded by Stew Langille, Lee Sherman, Tal Siach, and Adam Breckler in 2011.

History Visual.ly was inspired by the founders’ time at Mint.com. As Mint's Director of Marketing, Langille noticed that the infographics posted to MintLife, the company blog, generated 30 times more traffic than a comparable text article. According to Langille, “we knew we were onto something big.” In April 2011, Langille, along with MintLife's Editor-in-Chief Lee Sherman and Adam Breckler, a Mint web developer, left Mint.com to co-found Visual.ly with Tal Siach, the founder of Walyou, an Israeli gadget site. Langille states that Visual.ly works towards evolving how digital news media outlets present information, similar to how USA Today’s weather infographics transformed news outlets in the early ‘90s and how Wired’s graphic design influenced digital media in the early 2000s. In October 2011, Visual.ly announced a $2 million round in seed funding, led by Crosslink Capital, 500 Startups, and SoftTech. At the time of the announcement, Visual.ly had 26,000 users, 7,000 infographics, and 1 million monthly page views. They have partnered with The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, and National Geographic, among other media outlets, to provide infographics and data visualizations.

Site structure Visual.ly is structured both as a showcase for infographics as well as a marketplace and community for publishers, designers, and researchers. The site allows users to search images through description, tags, and sources in a variety of categories, ranging from Education to Business or Politics. Users can publish infographics to their personal profile, which they can subsequently share through their social networks. Visual.ly maintains a team of data analysts, journalists, and designers that create infographics and data visualizations using the Visual.ly tools. They are currently developing a tool that allows anyone to create and publish their own data visualizations. Through this tool, users will be able to gather information from databases and APIs in an automated service (meaning that users only need to specify the kind of information they want to visually display) to produce an infographic. Visual.ly's first tool, the Twitter Visualizer tool allows users to input the Twitter handles of two people, and then generates an infographic comparing the hobbies, number of followers and occupation of the two accounts. CBC used this feature to compare leading politicians.

Reception Visual.ly's infographics have been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post and CNN. They were named as one of Inc. Magazine’s 10 new web tools to make life easier. Their YouTube channel has received over 100,000 views.

References

External links Visual.ly

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Visual.ly

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Visual.ly claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Visual.ly before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Visual.ly ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Visual.ly

In research: Visual.ly appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Visual.ly in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Visual.ly is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 500 Startups companies, Companies based in San Francisco, Data and information visualization software, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Visual.ly outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Visual.ly in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Visual.ly means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Visual.ly out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Visual.ly in simple terms?

Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics. It was founded by Stew Langille, Lee Sherman, Tal Siach, and Adam Breckler in 2011.

Why does Visual.ly matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Visual.ly?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Visual.ly.