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).

1. 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

2. Death of the Pie Chart.  Using pixels instead of pie charts to demonstrate relative size. I like it.
   

   Pixel graphs

3. 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.

4. 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.
5. 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.

6. The Shape of Song.  Graphical representations of music. I did one for Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.
   

   Visualization of Nocturne in E flat.

7. 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.

In my last few days at the Burke Museum, I’ve been tasked with doing anything web analytics possible until I leave.  There’s so much more I wanted to accomplish in terms of figuring out goals for the site and assessing who our users are, but hopefully web analytics won’t get tossed aside forever after I’m gone.

We’ve already done overall assessments and reports on site metrics, so I’ve been trying to figure out actions they can take that will be easy to code and maintain.  Dealing with user engagement is the biggest issue so far, especially because measuring it is difficult and open to interpretation. If they at least attempt to address engaging and interacting with our users, I will die happy.

Average Time Graph

I’ve also focused on looking at things that we redesigned recently to track their performance since they went live.  I’m totally a nerd and I got really into how we could track conversions for the Education sub-site, and how we could better market them for next year.  Common conversions for an e-commerce site might be how many people get to a confirmation page after buying something, but for an informative site like the Burke Museum, its more difficult to decide what counts as a user that basically “did what we want them to do.”  Also, the charts I put in the reports are very pretty.

Mainly I’ve just been producing reports that I’m not sure anyone has the time or interest in reading, but what else is there to do when I’m going to be gone soon? I should think of something more creative. They might not read a report, but they will always remember a dirty limerick on web analytics.

…and in other news Michael Jackson died?? Sad times.