Now the work begins...

So I looked at all the bar graphs and spider charts and curving lines and symbols and meters and let them percolate for a while in my head and then suddenly I knew what I needed to do.

I've always been an intuitive decision-maker -- I just "know" when a decision is the right one for me. It's like I can feel the current of my life flowing around me, even though I can't see it.

My career-of-choice candidate is "Visual Analytics". You probably don't know what this is. I didn't either when I started this, so let me explain.

Visual Analytics as a separately-named discipline, seems to have sprung out of the 9/11 tragedies. It operates on the premise that some analysis is still too complex for machines to do alone. At some level, a human needs to look at the data to make sense of it, so Visual Analytics augments computational analysis with sophisticated visualization technologies to allow humans to navigate data sets in flexible ways. It makes use of boundary objects and creative display methods and color in ways that most user interfaces do not. After all, there is still nothing on Earth to match the human brain for visual pattern recognition. Not even close. Visual Analytics is, therefore, a combination of data mining, algorithmic reasoning, and scientific visualization. But it also requires an understanding of cognitive reasoning as well as domain expertise. What's cool about this is that this didn't really exist as a distinct discipline ten years ago.

After 9/11, the NSA set up a series of grants with academia and industry to work on techniques for pulling patterns out of complex data sets. Georgia Tech, here in town, is one of the centers for grant work, though much of it has, of course, also taken place on the West Coast. They even wrote a book about it.

Why is this "it" for me? Well, it seems to combine nearly all of the things I find important:

• Focus on data and ideas (rather than people or things)
• For the purposes of reaching a specific decision (i.e., it's actionable and not academic)
• It has a creative element as well as a software element
• The gap between work and result can be measured in days and weeks (not quarters and years)
• The ability to work collaboratively
• It seems to have considerable as-yet-unrealized monetization potential

This is incredibly exciting. Even though I still don't know what this means for me personally (yet), I feel this weight lifted off my chest because I have something new to learn and pursue. Plus, so much of what I've done in the past two years was pointing me in this direction, even though I was not consciously aware of it.

So what next? Well, I've already contacted a couple of people in town (via the LinkedIn network) who are knowledgeable about the Visual Analytics space and who have agreed to let me bombard them with questions for the price of a latte and a scone. I've got lunch with a couple of graphic designer friends next week who can also help me figure out where to go. I'm going to work my Tech network to learn what I can about their activities.

I have a million questions (even though the list below is clearly not a million):

• What kinds of jobs exist in this space?
• What skills/education is required here?
• What opportunities exist?
• Is all work bespoke (because of domain specificity) or can it be platform based?
• To what degree does the cognitive model of the audience alter what you produce?
• Can/should this analysis be verticalized into specific segments?

Who knows? Maybe I'll learn this isn't for me. Or that I lack the skills. Or that I'm too late to the market. Or that Visual Analytics designers can only be named Weatherby. But I'll bet not. It's early days yet (still) and I really do believe that if you're passionate about something, you'll find a way to be great at it. More soon.