“However, the works that caught my eyes was that of Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Since the days of the caveman, we’ve been using information graphics or ‘infographics’, as visual shorthand to convey information to the viewer that might take paragraphs or pages to explain in words. We interact with infographics on a daily basis, from the stick figure telling us when to cross the street, to icons in a web navigational menu. The field of infographics is exploding, with Edward Tufte being the current leading expert. There are many great examples to be found, that run the gamut of information displayed…”

“Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best…”

“Swift-3D is a system for visually surfing datasets of hundreds of millions of items, with the full data available for answering queries down to individual records. Swift has a high-interaction visual interface constructed from 3D maps, 2D charts, tables, and network diagrams.”

From one of the guys who put together ChartChooser: “Here’s something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny’s classic work Saying It With Charts.”

“confess. if you read this blog, you are addicted to data. this means you do not like Christmas presents. in fact, you hate those information-less presents your friends buy you each year. even after patiently telling them ‘any present should self-update at least each 30 seconds’, last year’s Christmas was still a disaster, despite that wireless weather station from your wife that is now measuring the temperature & humidity of those boxes on your attic.

starting from $15, here are infosthetics’ 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted.”

“As it turns out, though, it appears that most of these examples probably wouldn’t be considered “information visualization” by the “information visualization” community represented by the InfoVis conference, presumably because, for the most part, they aren’t designed as tools with which you do rigorous analytic work.”

“The history of the modern info-graph starts sometime in the 17th century, and was closely linked with the development of methods of statistical analysis (early graphs show simple distribution curves of statistical data.) But it wasn’t until the 18th century when data visualization really took off, and people started to develop methods that we still use today.”

“This web site provides access to a comprehehsive set of software packages easing the exploration, modification, comparison, and extension of data mining and information visualization algorithms. Diverse software packages were bundled into learning modules. Access to a large-scale data repository, extensive compute resources, and a growing set of references are provided as well. It is our hope that the community will adopt this resource to foster Information Visualization education and research.”

“Data charts and diagrams are used when statistical data has to be presented in the most convenient and usable way. Visual charts are clear, visually appealing and easier to perceive than some simple enumerations or tables — mainly because users don’t have to analyze the meaning of presented facts, but can perceive main tendencies through the visual weight of the facts — directly.

You can create charts in graphic editors or use special applications (software or web-apps) which can help you to create your charts in few minutes. However, once you’d like to update an old chart, or create a new one, you have to run the application and create new images over and over again. That’s not flexible. Or maybe you just want to offer your visitors not a simple image, but a powerful dynamic chart.”

“The emerging field of visualization studies examines the use of pictures to improve the access to information, the quality of software, or the communication of knowledge. Prominent research fields in this area are information visualization (a domain of computer science), scientific visualization, or software visualization. Other highly relevant research sectors for the understanding of pictures in communication are design studies and the psychology of perception.”

“This application example uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall, up-to-the-minute impression of people’s raw feelings and thoughts on the network. Typically such language visualization applications screen out common words, such as our Answers Cloud. When we look at such pronoun words and see how often they are used on Yahoo! Answers, an overall pattern of common meaning and usage emerges.”

“The InfoVis Toolkit is a Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to ease the development of Information Visualization applications and components… The InfoVis Toolkit, as of version 0.9, implements nine (9) types of visualization: Scatter Plots, Time Series, Parallel Coordinates and Matrices for tables; Node-Link diagrams, Icicle trees and Treemaps for trees; Adjacency Matrices and Node-Link diagrams for graphs.”

“I’m Enrico Bertini a postdoc researcher at the Departement of Informatics at University of Fribourg, Switzerland. My research activity focuses mainly on Information Visualization, that is, graphical interactive interfaces to access complex and/or large volume information to extract knowledge and support the formation and assessment of hypothesis.”

“Data presentation can be both beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approached to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?”