Gary Flake of Microsoft gave a great demo of Pivot at TED last month that very quickly exposes how powerful navigating through data can be. I've been struggling for hours to think of something poignant to say about this, but the video does a better job than I ever could, so I'll let it speak for itself.
Recently in data visualization
New York agency Sarkissian Mason just relaunched their website with a combination
worship/slam of data gathering and analysis.
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worship/slam of data gathering and analysis.The firm wired up their office with a bunch of sensors, tied them together using Arduino, and are publishing the real-time results of their data gathering on their homepage, providing a peek at various metrics about life at the firm. It would seem that by doing so, they are implying that the gathering and analysis of data is relevant to creativity. Not so, however. If you watch their "behind the scenes" video, they clearly state that gathering numbers doesn't lead to better ideas. I strongly disagree. While it isn't enough to just gather data and look at it in order to come up with better ideas, data gathering and visualization can certainly give people the insights needed to make better decisions as well as provide inspiration for great ideas.
Either way, the site totally works.
The USDA just released a new tool called Your Food Environment Atlas which is essentially a giant interactive mapping data visualization about food in the US. It is a county-by-county mapping tool that draws data from USDA's Economic Research Service and mixes 90 different sets of data about Food Choices, Health and Well-Being and Community Characteristics (such as demographic, income and amenities data).Users of the service can look at the data in a few ways: they can create maps showing the data across all counties, they can view all of the county-level data for any individual county, or they can create maps of counties sharing the same degree of multiple-indicators, potentially revealing hidden relationships between various data values. For example, the map
shown is a plot of counties with high obesity rates and a relatively high occurrence of convenience stores with gas, which as you can see has almost no correlation.
I really love how transparent our current government is becoming and look forward to seeing how people integrate this data with other sets currently available. Now, if they can just get a designer in there to make this thing more pretty, it would be even better.
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More than just transforming data into practical information, Jeff Clark has made data visualization "cool" with his twitter-based interactive infographics. Highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review online article, Clark is a computer programmer whose brilliance is manifested through his discerning research and ability to translate the results graphically.
Featured in the article are four of Clark's Twitter infographics--TwitterVenn, Twitter Spectrum, TwitterArcs and StreamGraph (shown below).
While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.
Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website.
While the graphs are both beautiful and accurate, one of the major concerns is using java as this language is particularly slow.Regardless, Clark is paving the way for how we use and view information, especially relating to business and social activity. Read more about his data visualizations and see more stunning examples from his website.
NYC BigApps is a contest to drive innovation in software that can help the city of New York become more sustainable through transparency, accessibility and accountability. The requirements were simple: write an web-based app that utilizes data from the NYC.gov "Data Mine" -- a catalog of sets of public data produced by local agencies.
The content awards $20K in cash prizes to 13 winners announced tonight. I know a lot of the judges and I think they did a great job acknowledging some really good entries. Personally, I think Trees Near You and WayFinder are the best of the best. Core77 has some in-depth reporting on these and other winners.
David Young and I both got graduate degrees from the MIT Media Lab. We studied at the Visible Language Workshop under the extremely influential Muriel Cooper. Today David blogged about his feelings about Muriel and they are so in line with my own, I just had to link to it. My time at the Lab set me on the path I am on today and I, like David, miss Muriel too. He's also motivated me to dig up my old tapes from those years and get them online soon. In the mean time, watch this:
Clearly a person who loves data visualization and thoroughly understands the power of illustrating personal tracking, infographic designer Nicholas Felton released his
fifth annual report, the culmination of yet another year's worth of
data accretion and (according to his Facebook status) well over 200
hours of labor. With The 2009 Feltron Annual Report,
Felton stepped up his game a sizable notch by creating his first ever
crowd-sourced report, enlisting the help of relatives, friends,
colleagues and even his dentist.
Calling daily on the people he met who he felt "had discerned enough of my personality and activities" to submit a record of the encounter through an online survey, the designer tracked responses and used his own subjective analysis to come up with the data set. While Felton acknowledges the variations in accuracy his methods produce, he explains that he "strives to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected. "
Felton also notes that the volume of data was so unwieldy it could have easily spiraled into several more reports. To manage all of the information (and keep his sanity), he enlisted the help of such tools as Processing and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The final product once again makes an intriguingly elegant representation of an individual's activities over the course of a year--this time recorded under the surveillance of his peers.
2010 is starting off with some great articles about data visualization and their building importance to the business world. On the Harvard Business Review site, former HBS professor John Sviokla writes a quick post about three benefits of data visualization. What are they?
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- Great visualizations are efficient
- Great visualizations can help people discover new understandings
- Great visualizations can help create shared understandings
While his article is clear, it doesn't really go in to too much detail, which is unfortunate. With such a great pedigree and a great audience, he could do much more to help champion great data-driven stories.
A much more detailed and predictive article is entitled The State of Information Visualization over on the Eager Eyes blog by Robert Kosara. He (rightly, I think) predicts that interactive web-based data visualizations are going to grow in popularity and complexity and start to be implemented in JavaScript. Like me, he also thinks that bioinformatics will be the main area of growth -- data about people's bodies. He even thinks 2010 could be "The Year of Visualization Theory" where new academic discourse leads to a much better understanding of how visualization should work in the digital age. I sure hope he's right!
Taking data visualizing to a conceptual level, Danish design studio Hvass&Hannibal's upcoming exhibition "Losing the Plot" at London's Kemistry Gallery engagingly reinterprets info into artworks. (Click on all images for expanded view)
The Copenhagen-based duo created silkscreen prints, wooden sculptures and offset posters, beautifully and tangibly expressing data sets such as the probability theory or the registration of natural phenomena. Adding their own sensitivity to hard statistics, the multimedia designers imagine the data in bold colors, sometimes playing on traditional geometric shapes and at other times turning to more abstract imagery.
The unconventional approach isn't a stretch for Hvass&Hannibal who dropped out of grad school to design full time. Their broad spectrum of work includes album covers, illustrations, installations, music videos, art direction and the team recently offered their design knowledge as guest bloggers on "It's Nice That."
In addition to the works in the show, Kemistry will sell a series of silkscreen prints.
Losing the Plot
15 January-27 February 2010
Kemistry Gallery
43 Charlotte Road
London EC2A 3PD map
tel. +44 (0)20 7729 3636
via Cool Hunting
Stemming from a childhood fascination of a weather ball on the top of a bank building in Minneapolis, I am intrigued by Tomorrow's Weather, a double helix sculpture in Denmark comprised of over 60 molecular globes. What's interesting about this is that traditional weather balls--also known as weather beacons--are usually located on top of buildings or attached to towers. Tomorrow's Weather uses current technology to forecast upcoming elements just like a weather ball, while remaining affixed to the side of the building.
Weather beacons are found in cities from Sydney to Cincinnati, so have a look around to see if your city is included. Often a little poem is attached to the weather codes to make its information easy to memorize. I will never forget that "when the weather ball is red, warmer weather is ahead..."
For real weather fanatics, check out the ambient weather beacon, a home device that also forecasts the upcoming weather.
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When the 900-pound gorilla Microsoft announces, as they did a few days ago, a new experimental language for creating interactive data visualizations, people sit up and pay attention. This confirmation of the explosive growth of the field appeals to both programming novices and experts alike, cutting [out?] a wide swatch of potential customers.
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A preview is coming early next year, so most people can only speculate on its impact, but I think it is going to be huge. Patterned after Processing (another recent programming
language with rich data visualization techniques), this project from the Microsoft Computational Science Studio is meant to move beyond the usual bar, pie and line charts found so often in Powerpoint and other professional business presentations. Targeting the same audiences, the new language will include features such as maps, 3d shapes, animation features, interaction features, volumetric renderers, transparent colors and a rich library of rendering techniques--as stated in their press materials. The new application doesn't sound like something "people who aren't experts in programming" would want to use.
While personally this all sounds exciting to a geek like me, I can't help but feel that Microsoft saw the success of the new language and ecosystem started by Ben Fry and Casey Reas (Processing), and simply copied the concepts and capabilities and packaged it in a Windows-only, watered-down legally-oppressive "prototype."
As it was the most digital, this past holiday weekend most likely generated more data about our habits than any other in history. Two great new online visualizations portray this with beautiful and clear stories about the typical Thanksgiving activities--shopping and cooking.
I first saw eBay's Black Friday map on TechCrunch and was immediately impressed with how hypnotic and psychedelic it was. The pulsating graphics illustrate interesting patterns of our eBay shopping habits on Black Friday, the supposedly biggest shopping day of the year.
The New York Times published What's Cooking on Thanksgiving, a typically clean, clear and wonderfully produced map of allrecipes.com search terms, showing overt regional patterns in our holiday food preferences, or at least our desire to research recipes about those foods.
The brainchild of a strategist and an art director, This Is Plot illustrates the subtle beauty of economic data. Each necklace is handcrafted by the London office of advertising giant Wieden+Kennedy, and is comprised of the traded commodities gold, silver, oil and lead. Celebrating the "stories of exact facts," each necklace plots the price of its representative commodity over the span of thirty years, beautifully marking its highs and lows.
The clever necklaces are seemingly the first to plot data as well as the first collection for Wieden+Kennedy, who are plotting another series soon. Prices vary depending on material, range from £94-240 and can be purchased from This Is Plot.
A topical focus of EXP, data visualization is a powerful tool that allows for easily conveying the incredible stories hidden within a set of data.One clear illustration of this is Anscombe's quartet. Created in 1973, the quartet is four sets of data with identical statistical properties but wildly different visualizations.
Each of the images at the right is from a set of such numbers and below it, a mathematical description. In English, their basic statistical
measures and averages are the same but the shape of the data isn't. Just like the average size of two 6-foot people is 6-foot, so is the average height of two men, one being 3 feet tall and other being 9.
For much more, immerse yourself in the work of Ed Tufte. His first and possibly most famous book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, remains a bible of data visualization and informational graphic design illustrating this example and countless others.
Time Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has a new passion. His new mission is Linked Data. He wants people to post data on the internet in the same way and with the same enthusiasm that people post articles, documents and pictures. His assertion, and I agree, is that if people shared data the same way they share other information on the web, we'd be able to learn about and solve all sorts of problems we don't even recognize. Watch it and believe. After all, the British Government recently appointed him as the person responsible for opening up England's data to the web. Watch his TED talk below for a passionate and exciting presentation about the subject.
While it could use more interactivity and some more color, the latest data visualization from the New York Times, about the jobless rate, is a simple clean and effective use of interactive graphics to tell a depressing and interesting story.
MarineTraffic.com is a new website based on Google Maps and some open data that allows people to monitor real time ship traffic around the world. Because of some data constraints, the information is mostly about ships on the European and North American coastlines, but a full range of ships are in the system.The project is hosted by the Department of Project and Systems Design Engineering at the University of the Aegean in Greece. Rolling over a ship icon reveals information such as the heading and history of the vehicle.
The site refreshes itself automatically every minute or so (depending on what part of the world you are monitoring), making the entire experience fun to just use as a screensaver.
Seemingly inspired by the Eames' Powers of Ten, this infinite zoom interactive visualization does a great job of explaining relative sizes and is fun for all ages.
EA Sports launched Fifa Earth, an incredible three-part real-time interactive data visualization based on their FIFA 10 soccer game. By allowing the game to upload its information to a global server, the application then tracks the number of people playing, wins, losses, draws and other information. The site also collects all of the tweets about FIFA (by searching for tags such as #fifa, #fussball, #soccer and the like) and displays them on a sexy image of the Earth-as-a-soccer-ball.When I visited the site today, there were over 40 million games played on the PlayStation ahd XBox networks alone all feeding data to the system. By the end of the year they expect over 2 billion!
Thanks, as always, infosthetics.
(I apologize for being so datavis heavy lately, I'll get back to the other subjects soon, I promise).
The Food Timeline is one of those rare sites where the text-only data visualization is the best design possible. A collection of snippets on thousands of foods and recipes sorted chronologically charts the introduction of everything from Kellogg's Corn Flakes to Stilton Cheese to almonds. At 10 years old, it could use a slight clean-up in terms of formatting and accuracy but even so it is an amazing resource for food enthusiasts. For example, check out their extensive notes on the history of Halloween foods.
Facebook recently released their US Gross National Happiness data visualization which looks at all of the status updates posted and tries to evaluate, using keywords, whether the author had a positive or negative attitude. It is certainly not accurate, but it sure is fun to play with.
Choosing a name for a baby is a modern-day affair thanks to digital technology. Flipping through books is still a popular method but websites are entering the mix and are for many parents-to-be the sole resource for this important right of passage. Baby Name Wizard is not just a great way to choose names for an expectant parent but is also compelling for anyone wishing to explore the history of the popularity of names in our country.
The product started as a book, but two interactive data visualizations on their website are worth visiting.The Name Voyager is an interactive data visualization tool for people to look at the popularity of a particular name over time. The Name Mapper takes the data even further and graphs the popularity of a particular name over time by geographic location. For example, the image shown here tells the story of how my name, Craig, lost favor in the south faster than it did in the north in the 1970's.
In 1953, Aspen-based Container Corporation of America released an atlas edited and designed by the Austrian typographer, Vogue Art Director, and creative genius Herbert Bayer. Taking over over seven years to complete, the World Geographic Atlas is a classic volume of information design that continues to resonate today. Recently on boxesandarrows, Nate Burgos wrote a fantastic analysis of this beautiful book (the same day I came across my copy as I was unpacking from our move).For enjoyment and inspiration, visit a flickr set of the entire book. Used print copies of can be found for $500-$1000 and up.
It's always nice to see classic designs that hold up decades later. I wish the majority of the web-based infographics looked this nice but I visit inspiring examples every day.
Good, a "collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward" is a good magazine and a great voice for sustainability of all types in the form of a magazine, events, online community and more.
Some of my favorite things they make are data graphics, even though they are mostly all static (so they can live both in print and online). You can find a selection on their site in a section called Transparency -- a name with multiple meanings, including a nod to the transparencies of overhead projector days.
On the site interaction is limited to zooming in and out. After sampling the greatest hits on their site, head over to their flickr set where you can see almost the entire collection in the full colorful and informative glory.
On the site interaction is limited to zooming in and out. After sampling the greatest hits on their site, head over to their flickr set where you can see almost the entire collection in the full colorful and informative glory.
Well-formed.eigenfactor.org is a clean interactive visualization that explores emerging patterns in citation networks. Using citation data from Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports, the application analyzes the most influential articles from 1997-2005.The system was built in flare, an excellent open-source resource for making data visualizations that supports data management, visual encoding, animation and interaction.
I recently read a great article in the New York Times about the downfall of taxonomy. I agree that we don't know as much about the natural order as we used to. It seems the current mind has replaced that knowledge with an equal number of complex taxonomies including flavors of candy, models of cars, sports teams, celebrities and operating systems.
Last week my family moved from our home of the last 10 years, the highlight of which was the 350-square foot terrace half-filled with plants. For us it was a small act of sustainability, not just in terms of ecology, but also culturally by instilling nature-based taxonomies to our children. Avid eaters, our guests enjoyed the many species the kids would identify, pick and taste. Here is a visual tribute to that garden:
I'll miss it.
Fine art holds a great deal of potential opportunity for smart data visualization installations that integrate with analog elements. Tim Schwartz's Command Center is an elegant example of this, combined with a serious message. Tim has written a very useful tool for data visualization -- a graphing interface for a dataset consisting of every word written in the New York Times since 1851. This huge set of data drives the Command Center by displaying the frequency of certain words (weapons, war and others) on old-fashioned analog gauges and the year on a red LED counter.
The content is a loop that starts in 1851 and progresses one year every few seconds. Over time viewers develop a sense of a slice of history as translated by the Times and Mr. Schwartz.
Following the success of DataSF, an online repository of datasets about San Francisco, Stamen Design recently launched San Francisco CrimeSpotting -- a San Francisco-based version of their Oakland Crimespotting project.
The Crimespotting sites include interactive maps of reported crimes alongside clean and efficient graphics -- both great examples of map-based data visualizations that can quickly tell stories. Other excellent geo-mapped crime experiences include MSNBC's Every Block, LAPD's Crime Maps and The NY Times' Homocide Map.
As food consumption becomes an increasingly hot topic, data visualizations are being used as tools to convey information about eating habits. A recent project from the incredible London Times Online Labs provides a beautiful look for a collection of lifeless surveys done by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, showing What Britain Eats through a simple and clean interactive graphic.
