Engadget recently unveiled their site redesign, and I missed this early on, but it seems to be a new thing they’ve added -
Clearly they must have seen the brilliant work Steve and I are doing and decided to jump on board. Check out the link to see it at work, pretty simple but effective visualization they’ve got going on.
[ Engadget ]
Here’s a link to Ben Fry’s data visualization of Darwin’s revisions to On the Origin of Species across the 6 editions of the book that were released. It’s a great time-based piece that reveals a narrative in its own right.
[ The Preservation of Favoured Traces ]
Examples of personal data visualization
http://flowingdata.com/2008/09/09/winner-of-the-personal-visualization-project-is/
Visualizing Emotion
http://www.emotionallyvague.com/index.php
http://www.adaagallery.com/honor/2331L.php
Visualizing Outlook E-mail box
http://www.cre8ive.kr/blog/?p=374
Presentation PDF file
http://www.cre8ive.kr/blog/wp-content/uploads/DataViz_PersonalExp.pdf
My inspirational data visualization isn’t a single specific work, but rather a more general type of data visualization.
Public domain work by Hal Jespersen (http://posix.com/CWmaps/)
Battle maps are something anyone who has read about war has seen. They illustrate the movements and interactions of different belligerents during armed conflicts. Details will vary from artist to artist, but all battle maps start with an actual geographic map of the battle location. On top of that, troop movements are represented. In this example, Hal Jespersen uses thick colored lines to represent various sub-orginizations of soldiers holding a position. Emanating from those are arrows, indicating advancement. Occasionally, an arrow with a dotted line is shown indicating retreat. Names are written near standing soldiers indicating the commanding officer’s name and serving to identify that group.
What I find fascinating about these maps is how they tell a story that can take place over days and weeks in a single static image. The entire story of rest, advancement, battle, defeat and retreat is told without varying time at all. Towards the bottom we can see, for example, that Toombs was holding the position behind the river, but was overrun by Burnside’s offensive across the bridge and forced to retreat. In response, A.P. Hill (arriving later) was sent to cover Toombs’s retreat and counter the advancing enemy. Burnside’s troops engage D.R. Jones’s forces to the North. The goal of the blue forces is to reach the city of Sharpsburg which is cocooned in thick red lines defending it.
Other stories are evident in the map as well. Several of sumner’s advances were forced to retreat, with D.H. Hill’s forces holding their ground. However, these forces were themselves forced to retreat and be reenforced, only stopping Sumner when they had pulled back considerably. This back and forth swing of domination of the battle field implies a very violent conflict, and the area is labeled “Bloody Lane”.
Battle maps are not perfect, and this example of their design is certainly no exception. In larger maps, it can become difficult to discern the chronology of events. In the example given, it is also impossible to tell the scale of the timeline in question. Did this battle take place in an hour? A day? A week? Anyone of them is a plausible answer, and the map does little to address the issue. The only hint we are given is the fact that A.P. Hill arrived in the “late afternoon”. The battle would have to have happened over the course of less than a day for that label to be meaningful.
Like I said, I really like how the events “as they unfold” are depicted statically and rather effectively. Complex narratives can be extracted from the map easily, and the goals and ambitions of two warring groups are made plain to see.
Evan Roth’s Graffiti Taxomony
Evan Roth, a Parsons D & T graduate, created a data visualization project that stemmed out of his thesis research. Graffiti Taxonomy was a study of the most common letters used in graffiti and a visual representation
of the diversity of shapes that the letters took. In this representation that is at the Foundation Cartier, Evan uses graffiti that is found around Paris as his survery group. The most common letters that are used for his survey are the letters A,E,I,K,N,O,R,S,T and U. In his presentation, the use is able to scroll through each example, sorted by the common letter and we cna se the original graffiti.
The project is being presented in the form of an innteractive website as well as a physical representation on the building of the Foundation Cartier.
Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009 from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Additional Information on his methodolgy for
is an installation web data viz project which exhibited in MOMA Design and the Elastic Mind.
I Want You To Want Me chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours. The system searches these sites for certain phrases, which it then collects and stores in a database. These phrases, taken out of context, provide partial glimpses into people’s private lives. Simultaneously, the system forms an evolving zeitgeist of dating, tracking the most popular first dates, turn-ons, desires, self-descriptions and interests.
I went to the exhibition personally and it was mind-blowing experience. I am always interested in human relationship and social networking. I Want You to Want Me has a 56-inch touch screen interface which you can browse through profiles which collection from various online dating sites every few hours.
The dating site usually has a complex search engine with poor interface design. I Want You to Want Me changed the experience that how the online dating site can display their member profile database. It’s playful, easy to understand and fun. It makes the serious profile page into objects like balloons flying in the sky. The profile searching experience is much more visual and interactive than what your typical online dating site does.
“The Whale Hunt” is a super interesting data visualization project by Jonathan Harris which pushes the boundaries between the real world and the database world (as discussed in the Christiane Paul paper). This project consists of an entire trip from new york city to alaska that ultimately results in the capturing, killing, and butchering of a whale for an Eskimo village’s winter food. The documentation is presented in a variety of ways, with each photo being classified as a certain emotion. The user has the ability to sort the photo and documentation in a variety of ways that allow them to experience different emotions.
I am sure that I’m leaving something out, but by watching the artist himself talk about the work you can get the whole story. Here is a Ted Talk, go to about 5:45 to see the discussion involving this project.
This blog won’t let me embed video, so Here is a link to the Ted Talk
i’m interested in maps and navigation. more specifically im interested in subways and urban cartography. so i was drawn to these 2 subway maps:
the first is called “NYC Subway Ridership 1905-2006″ which shows ridership density for each train and year using a scrubber.
and the 2nd is a redesign of the NY subway map. it’s a combo of the current NY subway map and massimo’s 1972 subway map:
Design and the Elastic Mind is a MoMA exhibition represented in a web site. “The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use.” The site contains information for over 300 projects. The site visually links the projects together by drawing lines between similar projects. Projects can be viewed by clicking on them.
1. Narratives 2.0 is a series of pieces that visualize song data. The songs are broken down into channels assembled in a fan-like structure with lines growing out. The frequency of the channel changes the angles at which the lines are drawn and the level changes the color – orange for higher levels and white for lower. The uniformity and arrangement of the music is apparent and seems to form an abstract narrative.
2. Spectra is another source of inspiration. It is a news aggregator and the options for displaying the data are interesting.
