A slideshow at Slate: “How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen…. Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn’t yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.”
Visualizing large graphs: Graph drawing of matrices in the University of Florida Collection
“Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection. The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 1890 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (for rectangular matrix, an augmented matrix is formed first) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm.”
Stefanie Posavec “On the Map”
“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!)
An Infographic is Worth 1,000 Words
“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…”
The Best Tools for Visualization
“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…”
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AT&T Information Visualization: Swift-3D
“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.”
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Choosing a good chart
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.”
infosthetics shopping guide for the data-addicted
“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.”
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InfoVis impressions, part 1
“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.”
Visualization of Numeric Data: A Brief Historical Overview
“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.”
