Newswire Crossword- Data Viz Play

I originally wanted to focus on how:
-People are on their cell phones a lot
-People leading busy lives having little time
-Information overload [amount of of new data generated in 2005 was many orders of magnitude
greater than the whole library of congress, several exabytes created, nearly 37,000 times more]
-How to make information fun
-Serendipity of finding interesting articles

I am still learning as3, so my first prototype is limited, only showing newswire headlines and
how long the article would take to read (iphone app in mind). I focused on the aspect of
time to read articles. For example, you might be waiting in a long line and only have time to
read a 5 minute article and not much more, even though there are more interesting articles to
read…time is of the essence these days.

prototype in as3

To address the bullet points above, I conceptualized a cross word puzzle that was created using
Aonaware dictionary API & Newswire NYT API. Answers to the crosswords are headlines from the last 24 hrs and
clues are taken from the dictionary API. Once any crossword item is found, a link to that article is made available on mouse hover. Words are color coded for Category [i.e. business, culture, etc.] and a number is posted on the last square to tell the user how long the item will take to read. This makes for a fun way to learn words, find serendipitous articles and make fun/efficient use of time.

Newswire crossword - data viz play

Unstructured Text [pressentation: Nick, Bruce, Thai]

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0ARkS6E4L2Tb6ZGdiZ2M3dG5fMjFjYzJoeG5mZw&hl=en

Google doc link to presentation and video link for unstructured text.

Reading Response – Thai

1. Tufte Reading – Tufte is quite analytical in his approach to picking apart the typical bar graph design. One would think that its pretty hard to mess anything up as simple as a bar graph, but apparently its not. The article is a good reminder for us [as data is ever increasing with magnitude] to be efficient with our designs. I took a class last semester on info.design and found [from first few assignments] that many designers have a natural inclination to be overly decorative when designing information. While some of the observation he makes are arguable, the main thing I will take from this article is to look very critically at every element in a composition.
2. Christiane Paul – I had some reservations about this paper towards the beginning, it may have been the use of the term “meta-narrative.” This implied to me that from raw data elements, one can extract an overarching narrative.  I am not sure if breaking down any web page, hard drive or the internet in to component parts can tell a underlying-narrative. Its definitely a reductionistic point of view of stories/narratives. ex:Breaking a car totally apart might give me a few insights about its nature, but it wouldn’t give me a clue that it drives if I didn’t already know it could. The example of Alice in Wonderland assumes that one has read the story. If you have not read it, the TextArc would have no relevance since there is nothing to compare and contrast. The narrative and its constituent words are structurally coupled. So while its true that without an underlying configuration/set of words no story can be formed, without the story itself no truly meaningful analysis or “database aesthetic form” can be made using TextArc. I do agree that how we go about categorizing, structuring and filtering our data effects/constructs our culture because of value-full choices that are inherent in that process. The project Slippery Traces makes this apparent by making transparent  it’s database structure, but I am unsure of whether the creator’s [Slippery Traces] own values had more to do with results than phenomenon it is trying to shed light on.

favorite data visualization [Thai Le]

I am interested in seeing the systemic and connected nature of the world. Below is a data visualization created to show the dynamic nature of ecosystems. Users can change the balance of this system with interactive sliders. It shows how phytoplankton, zooplankton, decay and nitrogen effect the population dynamics of an this ecosystem. In this visualization you can see that increasing nitrogen to the system positively effects P growth, which increases Z growth which in turn [both] effect decay rate which feeds back into nitrogen rates. This data visual is driven by different models, based on research done by various organizations. There is a link below so feel free to play god!

http://coast.ocean.washington.edu/~neil/NPZvisualizer/