Point of View

The Swiss artist Felice Varini is a master of using point of view. If you view his work from the wrong spot it seems to just be a random collection of lines and colors, but if you are looking from the correct location it all comes together to form a stunning design. Below is one of his pieces titled ‘Huit carrés’.

If we didn't know what to look for when viewing ‘Huit carrés’ would we take the time to find out the correct spot to view it from? Or would we think that we see the whole picture when we see the room like in the left images above and then move on?

This is similar to the way we often look at our data. When we take quick “high level” glaces over our data, with overall averages, general trends, or simple charts, we may be missing the true picture it is painting. Often times, when the quick glances at our data show something interesting, that should be a tip off that there may be even more interesting trends to be found in our data. We just need to know where to look for them.

For example if we look at the overall counts for the violence data from the school district we see these numbers:

High School: 72

Middle School: 74

Intermediate School: 69

Elementary: 117

Male: 225

Female: 107

The picture that we see from this analysis is that males engage in more acts of violence, and there are about twice as many acts in Elementary schools and then similar numbers through the rest of the school levels.

But what if we take one more step into this analysis to get a different point of view? Lets look at gender and school level at the same time:

School Violence	Male	Female
High School	23	49
Middle School	50	24
Int. School	55	14
Elementary	97	20

Ah ha! We have learned something new here, notice that males commit more than twice the amount of acts of violence in all school levels except for High School, where females committed about twice the amount. Now we know something else about our data. It seems that there may be different times when violence issues occur with each gender -there are specific times when males and females need to be focused upon. We never could have seen this with just our first glance through the data.

We need to remember to take a couple of steps around when looking at our data to make sure that we have the correct point of view, because there are times when viewing it from an side angle does not give the same picture as viewing it straight on.