Information Visualization
[Live Blogged Notes from UX Week 2006]
[Michal Migurski of Stamen]
Data Viz: Why Now?
Because the tools and the audience have caught up.
Starting with Map of the Market from the let nineties. This was inspirational but largely alone. This tree map uses size and color.
Our palette of visualization is pretty sparse.
So why now?
Reason #1: Data Got Cheaper
Newsmap by Markos Wescamp. The data costs nothing because he is pulling from an open API. Colors mean topics, size means volume of stories, etc. Also a tree map.
FundRace used mapping data in a pioneering way. Red or Blue was a cell phone/ GPS add-on to this.
History Flow visualizes the history of Wikipedia pages.
These use data that is not abstract, it is highly individualized socially created stuff.
Phyllotaxy is built on the publicly and freely available data from flickr. It specifically uses Creative Commons data. Related Tag Browser is also a cool proof of a workable algorithm.
Reason #2: Flash Got Better
Added socket communication, emphasized developing interfaces, etc.
Gapminder is an amazing example of this.
Digg Labs is another example.
Etsy is built on a number of visualizations including shop-by-color.
One use: Geography
Election result map took a media assumption and scaled the visualization according to population and other more significant data points.
Mappr came out of a project done for MoveOn and evolved into an application built on the flickr API.
Open Street Map is all about mapping from a pedestrian perspective.
Open data is critical. Free software is useless without data. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
Attention by Stamen (link?)
Trixie Tracker started as a baby blog and then made a product for tracking your kid's development and sharing that information with your family. Mommy crack for type-A parents.
Week in Review is an awesome data viz project that uses paper and real live human being with pens!
So the future of this stuff?
Tableau is doing some cool stuff to help people choose appropriate visualization for the data set.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Information Visualization.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.samfelder.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/229
Who is this guy?
Leave a comment