This document discusses data visualization and big data. It defines big data as large data sets characterized by volume, velocity, and variety. Big data comes from various sources like business transactions, social media, sensors, and machine data. New technologies like Hadoop have helped store and analyze extremely large data sets to reveal patterns. The document emphasizes that visualizing data is important because humans do not understand raw data. Effective data visualization can show what is happening in the data, explain why, allow users to explore, and expose the data in a low-effort way for consumers. Examples are provided of visualizing religions in India and Australia, grocery sales data, movie ratings data, and birth data from the US and India to reveal patterns.