Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide (TED Talk)
March 9th, 2010
The very short TED talk by internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee shows a few of the interesting results where open data gets mashed up in various compelling data visualizations. The talk includes many examples the avid infosthetics reader should already know, including Where Does my Money Go?, California Stimulus Map, data.gov.uk Newspaper and OpenStreetMap Edits.
Other projects, not blogged about before on this site, include Making Water a Matter of Race [time.com], Afghanistan Election Data [afghanistanelectiondata.org] and Haiti OpenStreetMap Edits [itoworld.blogspot.com].
Watch the movie below.
See also another recent TED talk about a powerful data visualization tool developed by Microsoft: "Live Labs Pivot: A Massive Interactive Zoom on Data".
Accusing Google’s Business Practice through (another) Infographic Movie
March 9th, 2010
It seems the now classic infographic movie "Google Master Plan" from early 2007 is now finally outdated, as the main allegations have been recently updated by another infographically-style film, aptly titled The Beast File: Google [abc.net.au] (movie not viewable outside Australia, but watch a YouTube version below).
The new movie, which itself seems to be inspired by the visual zooming effects from the presentation software Prezi, defines Google as an advertising giant whose main goal is to track users and deliver targeted ads.
For the appropiate counter argumentation, you can read the following post at the official Google Operating System blog.
You can watch the movie below.
Clavilux 2000: Generative Music Visualization Composition
March 6th, 2010
Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted.
For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe's width reflects the length of each note. By mapping the color wheel on the circle of 5ths, the colors give the viewer (and listener) an impression of the harmonic relations. Notes belonging to one specific tonality correspond to colors from one specific area of the color wheel. Therefore each key has its own color scheme and "wrong" notes stand out in contrasting colors. The more different tonalities a music piece has, the more colorful the resulting visualization will be.
As all the stripes do not disappear, the resulting representation is able to convey insights about the composition as well as the specific performance: Which notes were played the most? Which were the loudest notes? Which range of the keys was played mostly? How harmonically constant was the music?
Watch the visualization in action below.
Live Labs Pivot: A Massive Interactive Zoom on Data (TED Talk)
March 6th, 2010
"Viewing information and data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information infographic." During his very impressive TED talk, Gary Flake, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, demos the novel and still experimental Pivot [getpivot.com] technology. Pivot is a completely new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on the Seadragon zooming technology, it enables spectacular zooming in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
"Right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse, we talk about the curse of information overload, drowning in data. What if we can turn that upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden."
Watch the video of the talk below.
What will it enable in the world of data visualization that was not possible before?
DaVis’10: Deadline Extended!
March 6th, 2010
You might have seen our previous announcement of DAVis, the 5th International Symposium on Design and Aesthetics in Visualisation, co-located with the much bigger IEEE IV010 conference in London.
For all those of you who missed the quite tight submission deadline, here is some very good news:
Submissions are still possible until March 21! Make sure to check out the rules about the style, maximum length, important dates, etc. at the IV'10 website (click on "Papers"). Here some answers to the questions we received so far: we accept long and short papers and posters, although long papers are much preferred. After successfully passing the double-blind peer-review process, all accepted submissions will be published as full academic publications in the official conference proceedings by IEEE and thus be available online for all to see.
Again - we are looking forward to your submissions and do not hesitate to get in touch, if there might be any open questions left!
This post was written by Moritz Stefaner, a researcher and freelance practitioner on the crossroads of design and information visualization. Occasionally, he blogs at well-formed-data.net.
What Do You Suggest? Exploring the Collective Lives of Google Users
March 5th, 2010
What Do You Suggest? [whatdoyousuggest.net] is a fun, interactive visual guide on a journey through the 'suggested' collective lives of millions of Google users.
The suggested words appear in the order in which Google suggests them. Each word is connected by a line of varying thickness representing the relative number of search results for a given Google search on the phrases which that word.
The suggestions provided by Google Suggest represent real searches which in all likelihood have been performed millions of times each by people from all around the world.
More detailed information is available on the author's blog.
See also the Joy of Revelation, which is based on the same data.
Thnkx Michael!
The Human Body as a Subway Map
March 5th, 2010
Sam Loman [just-sam.com] created an original take on illustrating the inner structure and workings of the human body as the tight intertwining of different systems (e.g. arterial, digestive, musculetal, respiratory, etc.), by way of a subway map metaphor.
The full size version is available below (by courtesy of Vizworld).
See also Animals on the Underground, Subway Map Bathroom Tiling, Redesigned NY Subway Map, Subway-Style Trend Maps, and Time-Based Subway Map.
Thnkx Peter!
Crumpled City Maps: When Folding Neatly is not that Practical
March 3rd, 2010
Traditional, neatly folding maps requires one to stop regularly, spread the map out, orient it the right way and then locate the right zone on the map that corresponds to the actual neighborhood, to find what you are looking for.
In contrast, Crumpled City Maps [pizzolorusso.com] proposes to use a soft, yet hard-wearing, waterproof material (Dupont™ Tyvek®) that is meant to be creased and crumpled. One can place a particular area on the palm of a hand to spot street names then just screw it up, stuff it back into its case or trousers' pocket, and carry on.
Currently in production, Pizzolorusso hopes to release the maps soon, which will include London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Berlin.
If you are interested in new forms of physical maps, be also sure to check out Panamap (a recent resurrection of the previously blogged but registered trade name-clashing Dynamap).
Via Cool Hunting.
Plasma: Networking the Issues Surrounding Aids
March 3rd, 2010
Plasma [moebio.com] is an interactive network (or should we say "animated heatmap"?) of links and tags that acts as a visualization experiment to inform ongoing research on aids. It takes an integral and holistic point of view of integrating any possible issue into a single visual map.
Each initiation seems to start from another (random?) set of keywords, so sometimes it is worth to reload the page or select individual tags to experience the potential of animating a network view by highlighting relative proximity instead of direct connectivity (edges).
Via Visual Complexity.
Data as Sound: NYTimes Sonification of Winter Olympics Results
March 2nd, 2010
In what I would call an original and unexpected twist, the NYTimes Graphic department recently released a series of auditory graphs highlighting one of the unique characteristics of the Winter Olympics results, titled " Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical" [nytimes.com].
In short, the innovative infographic attempts to communicate the relative competitiveness and closeness of each race in a more effective way by using sound instead of graphics. Here, the time spans of other athletes who finished after the winner are represented by playing music notes in an identical rhythm.
For instance, Annette Gerritsen of the Netherlands, in the women's 1,000-meter speedskating race, lost by only 0.02 of a second, "about the time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings."
Via @datamarket.