I made my presentation for homework this week using the presentations function in Google Drive. I did it on a very recent moment in history, the 2013 Papal Election of Pope Francis.

Also I thought the readings for this week’s class from Tufte on the negative aspects and uses of PowerPoint and Norvig’s illustration of many of these same points in his Gettysburge Powerpoint Presentation and subsequent comments about its creation were very interesting. I definitely agree that most people over use powerpoint and often presentations are just as good without them. It is also very true that most powerpoint users do not use it well for they do not think about design elements, readability, and color schemes and thus often end up with a very unsuccessful and hard to look at presentation. When one goes to use powerpoint for a presentation one should always begin by asking oneself the question “Do I really need it for my presentation?” Very often the answer will be “no” but if the answer is “yes” however one should be very carful to when creating it so that it functions as it should, as an aid to one’s presentation, and does not become one’s entire presentation.

Many Eyes was also an cool sight to explore and I like how it can present data in so many different ways. I like how the visualizations can take on classic forms of data representation such as bar graphs and charts as well as other more artistic and design centered forms such as word trees, tag clouds, and phrase nets. My one critique of the site however was that it is a little hard to figure out how to view visualizations that others have created and upload previously.