Data Visualization As Generative Narrative » seung

final project proposal

seung — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:27:27 +0000

idea 1

Overview:

The story of the stars (working title) explores the mutual influence of pop music and news media. The intention of this interactive visualization is to find correlation between rise and fall and popularity of the musicians over time. This visualization will compare the musicians’ success or fail on billboard chart and social, personal events on news articles related to the musicians regardless of their reputation. ex, after Michael Jackson died, album sales goes up)

Data:

Billboard open API

To use names of the artists from the billboard chart

NYT article search API

To get frequency of the musician’s names from the article

+
sentimental analysis API(evri) + NYT community API

to see positive/ negative opinions from people’s comment

Precedent :

Twitter data viz from MTV VMA

Michael Jackson billboard chart timeline from NYT

idea 2

Overview
This project will visualize the change of ranking history of bestselling books, and which publisher and author makes more/ less bestsellers, how long it takes for their books to become bestsellers after they are published( some books don’t get attention when they are published, but after certain events, suddenly they become top sellers. On the other hand, there are steady sellers. )

Data
NYT Best sellers api :
use ranking history, author, publisher, publish date

Precedents
360/365 Jer Thorp

idea 3

In the intrest of making data viz that can used in mobile platform, we thought about tracking hotspots in nyc ara. this idea is kind of broad as well, but might be worth exploring further. using nyt real estate api and other source like twitter( some place people casually talk about things ), how some area is more popular( sold well, get more attention) than others, which can be used as a tool to predict future rise in real estate market.

so with mobile phone, the visual will be changed based on the user’s location and the popularity of the spot.

mid-term project ideas

seung — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:31:56 +0000

by Yoon, Seung

download pdf here.

Times wire viz

seung — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:18:45 +0000

news clock
the idea for the first non-working visualization is making something similar to clock movement with the data because times wire is about real-time news of past 24 hrs. Here’s how this should work. When new headlines feeds in, the old headlines rotate just like clock hand( minute) moves. so older headlines gets smaller and disappear as time passes, and the screen keeps updates with newer feeds.

words into pixels
these are my initial sketch for the working version. it is based on the same data set as the first viz, but i wanted to create something more abstract. squares = color coded sections , and as times passes, viewers can get overall idea of what section had the most headlines for that day.

working version
screen grab of working version. i didn’t make squares yet, it is just getting 15 headlines from nyt. for some reason, this one is not working in web browser, but you can download the file from the link below.

click here to download the file.

reading responses

seung — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:24:43 +0000

chapter 9:
In this chapter, the author said ‘good design’ has two key elements : simplicity of design and complexity of data. This is the question I have been asking to myself all the time. “What is good design?” And I have my own definitions on good design, but it seems to change all the time. So, I am still looking for the answer. Tufte mentions aesthetics and technique in making good design. I think aesthetic is subjective. Some people say les is more, but there are other groups of people who say more is more. Visually attractive display or excellent technique could result good design, however I think good design should give something beyond just visibility. At the end, the author talks about scale, proportion, etc., which are useful tools to make better visual display. I could be wrong(most of times, I am wrong), but I don’t think there are principles or rules in design. There are successful designs that don’t follow those rules.

chapter 7:
One of the examples from this chapter, the shaped poem ‘easter wings’, was interesting, because I didn’t really think about meaning of words as data. I guess anything could be data. It is true that graphic elements multifunction when they are put into a map or graph. I think they create new layers when combined with each other.
When the author referred ‘contemporary’ design in this chapter, I stopped for a moment and looked through the pages to find out when this was written. The author mentioned that he started this book on 1975 and finished the first manuscript on 1982. I couldn’t imagine how contemporary design would look like at that time. What I find interesting is that most of theories Tufte talked about here still apply to today’s contemporary designs.

Data types: photographs and imagery

seung — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:36:49 +0000

Here are examples of imageries used as data types.

1. MTV’s visualization of twitter activity

go to the website
2. Side-by-side diagrams of a few common espresso drinks by Lokesh Dhakar

3. TED Sphere

4. Anatomy of Datagraphics by Tobias Nusser and Tom Ziora

4. work calendar

Facial expressions and body posture take on new significance as they symbolize the nature of work, the mood experienced while the work is performed.

reading response 2

seung — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:16:53 +0000

Proclarity:
The purpose of data visualization is communicating information effectively.
Dots, lines, bars, boxes, charts, etc. are made to help viewers understand data better. How to use those elements is the key to successful communication. And, proclarity can be a good tool to organize data clearly. However, I wonder if being effective is always good thing. The result could be just boring visualization like bars and charts. The reading explains well about elements of data, and how to formulate them, but it seems like most of things described could be done without thinking about them. Because our brain processes some data intuitively, even before we think about them.

showing complex data:
This reading also talks about visualization techniques. The difference between Proclarity and Tidwell is that Tidwell article includes visualization in interactive platform such as software, website, and UI. I find this reading more interesting because it shows how same data can be visualized differently by rearranging data. It seems like the author talks about specific technique and how and when it can be used. But, I’m not sure I agree on that. I think everybody’s brain digest information differently, so there can’t be set rules about certain technique works best in certain cases.