Beauty of Data Exhibit Opening Reception
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Kent State University Library 800 800 E Summit, Kent, Ohio 44240
We don’t often think of words, numbers, measurements or other pieces of “data” as beautiful. Yet, if you look around, you’ll see that our entire world is built using data — and it’s beautiful.
MuseLab director and SLIS Assistant Professor Kiersten F. Latham, Ph.D., together with museum studies students Cori Iannaggi and Mitch Sumner, invited Kent State researchers from all fields of study to submit visualizations created from their research. Their goal was to find examples of data coming together to create something beautiful.
The “Beauty of Data” explores how beauty is defined by researchers from different academic backgrounds across campus — including Anthropology, Biological Sciences, Fashion, Geography, Geology, Library and Information Science, and Visual Communication Design — in various forms of data visualization.
Highlights of the exhibit include a digital knit scarf designed and created with software instead of by hand; false color images of the collagen in a bonobo ACL; a traditionally crafted canoe paddle and bailer from the Solomon Islands; colorful chapter opener images from a K-8 mathematics dictionary; and a portrait bust of an elderly Pueblo Indian man sculpted with clay.