7 Data Visualizations That I like
June 26, 2009 at 8:06 pm
filed under Data Visualization, Web
Tagged blogosphere, blogs, books, data visualization, feelings, graphs, iSchool, ixd, michael jackson, music, The Grok, words
So in my continuing quest to figure out new ways to visualize data, I came across this article through The Grok, (which I realize is from 2007) in Smashing Magazine on new and interesting approaches to data visualization. I tested some of them out and I wanted to share and post pictures of the results (though some are better when in action than still).
- Amaztype. These people utilize Amazon Web Services to make a word of your choice based on book/album/dvd covers. You can sort of see the graphic design trends that people follow. I especially like that Goodnight Moon made it onto the Night visualization.
Night
Light
- Death of the Pie Chart. Using pixels instead of pie charts to demonstrate relative size. I like it.
Pixel graphs
- We Feel Fine. This site does amazing things to get a sense of how the world is doing by “harvesting feelings from weblogs.” You can filter based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date for 6 different ways of viewing the data. I tried out Madness, Montage, Murmurs and Mobs.
Filtered Madness by the feeling "sad", possibly about Michael Jackson.
An image from Montage.
- Websites as graphs. Graphs by the HTML code, so tables, links, images, etc. get different colored nodes. I made a graph of this site but I didn’t think it looked too interesting.
- Book/essay word visualization. A German Interaction Design Institute wanted to show the connection between words and ideas better and made an awesome sort of Venn diagram. One pretty much includes everything that I learned at the iSchool, and some extra German words tossed in.
Visualization of words in an interaction design text.
- The Shape of Song. Graphical representations of music. I did one for Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.
Visualization of Nocturne in E flat.
- Visual Complexity. The mother lode of data visualization, a large gallery of different types. I was really fascinated by the transportation ones. The ones I’m showing here are of the global internet distribution and the blogosphere from “inspirer” radiating to “inspiree.”
Global internet distribution
Blogosphere from inspirer in the center radiating to inspiree.
Related posts:
Jim McNerney (Boeing CEO)
on June 30, 2009 at 5:43 am
Impressive ideas! I really prefer the AmazType visualization. What a great representation of information.
We feel fine has some interesting ideas, but I think it still needs to be developed.
This seems like it is straight out of an iSchool class!
Boeing would be good to use these data visualization techniques!