Sticky overload

from http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/

“casual infovis,” or “information aesthetics,” or “data art

Author:
Mike Danziger

That said, my exposure to the field originally came through my work developing interactive scientific visualizations for educational purposes (teaching principles of physics and biology to undergrads and high school students), the design of which focused primarily on supporting informal learning rather than, or in addition to, “focused episodes of work” (to borrow a term from Pousman, et al.). Though these educational tools were often used to help solve specific problems, we were more concerned with making them approachable to non-experts and promoting a casual exploratory usage model. As I began to study information visualization, most of my encounters with it have come through the internet, and though I’ve read most of the “bible” texts of the field that are clearly representative of the “computer science” approach, the “live,” publicly available, high-profile examples of infovis that you typically see on the net would generally be characterized as “casual infovis,” or “information aesthetics,” or “data art,” or whatever you want to call it. This would include systems and tools like Many Eyes, the Baby Name Voyager, the ubiquitous work of design firms like Stamen Design, the various visual web search tools like TouchGraph, art projects like wefeelfine.org, probably some business intelligence related visualizations like the Map of the Market, and even advertising-related infovis like the now defunct Coca-Cola WorldChill visualization (there are of course many more examples, these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head). So, going in to the conference, my impression was that visualizations like these, regardless of the quality of their implementation, represented a legitimate area of study within the field of “information visualization.”As it turns out, though, it appears that most of these examples probably wouldn’t be considered “information visualization” by the “information visualization” community represented by the InfoVis conference, presumably because, for the most part, they aren’t designed as tools with which you do rigorous analytic work. I saw a lot of evidence for this (which I’ll get to below), but it was most explicitly stated by Stephen Few in his capstone presentation: Stephen pointed to these kinds of examples on the web (in addition to some that I agreed were legitimately horrifying) as presenting a “primitive,” misleading view of what “information visualization” is, and suggested that it was the job of the conference attendees to be “model thinkers and communicators” that “take up residence in the real world” to show the “outsiders” what infovis is really all about. And this was framed as one of the more progressive viewpoints on visualization at InfoVis.

 from http://visualmethods.blogspot.com

More Great Web Links

Contents

• Robbins and Few
• Disproportionate Risk
• Chameleon Ray Grid
• Maps for Scientists: Using
• Maps for Scientists: Choosing
• How to Silhouette
• Beautiful Evidence
• Mike’s Tip List
• Deceptive Areas
• Wacky Wheel of Wedges
• False Advertising
• The Scientist’s Rainbow
• Ditch the Tables, NYT!
• Beach Mouse Pelt Map
• Adding Variables
• Charting HTML
• A Tufte Library
• Better Axes
• The Graphical Octants
• More on the Planets
• New York Times Style
• Fixing Excel’s Charts
• Reflections on the Planets
• Mountains of War
• March of the Monarchs
• A Robin Williams Library
• March of the Ratites
• The Density of Deer Heels

Categories

• Makeovers
• Nice Work
• Reading List
• Tips and Techniques

Related Sites

• Edward Tufte
• InfoVis Wiki
• Visual Complexity
• Style.org
• Perceptual Edge
• Visual Methods
• Juice Analytics
• Infoclarity
• Junk Charts
• EagerEyes
• Information Aesthetics
• U. Oregon Data Graphics
• Historical Gallery
• Stats Resources

Websites to check out on visualization

information aesthetics

visualcomplexity.com

data mining (and more)

flowing data

eagereyes.org

many eyes

Junk Charts

Stat. Graphics & Data Visualization

Pictures of Numbers

Forest and the Trees

visual-literacy.org

programmableweb

knowledge-visualization.org

serial consign

coding horror

bokardo - social design

Vizthink conference (Jan 27-29, 2008)

from: http://vizthink.com/index.html

 Our goal at VizThink is to bring together a broad cross section of the visual thinking community. We’re bringing content from each of the visual arts disciplines together to create a unique mix of content. Here’s just a small sampling of some of the topics you’ll find at VizThink ‘08:

• Moving beyond bullet points…using storytelling for presentations
• Aligning individuals using visualization
• Visualization in 3D? When does it matter
• Facilitation using photographs
• Designing compelling and effective information graphics
• Virtual worlds: future or fad
• Creating a global visual language
• Organizing your world with visuals
• Using visuals for powerful presentations
• Storytelling through comics and graphic novels
• Visual techniques for analyzing data
• Visualization principles for software design
• Facilitation through live sketching
• Can there be a true language with grammar and structure that uses visuals?
• Visualization as a brainstorming tool

Information Visualization Journal

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ivs/index.html

Forthcoming in 2007 is our special issue on Visual Analytics by Guest Editor: Pak Chung Wong. Free online access to these papers will be available to you upon publication.

Included in the Visual Analytics special issue:

• Interactive Wormhole Detection and Evaluation;
  Weichao Wang, Aidong Lu
• NetLens: Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data;
  Hyunmo Kang, Catherine Plaisant, Bongshin Lee, Benjamin B. Bederson
• ScentIndex and ScentHighlights: Productive Reading Techniques for Conceptually Reorganizing Subject Indexes and Highlighting Passages;
  Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Julie Heiser, Stuart K. Card, Michelle Gumbrecht
• Ewall: A Visual Analytics Environment for Collaborative Sense-Making;
  Paul E. Keel
• A Visualization Testbed for Analyzing the Performance of Computational Linguistics Algorithms;
  Stephen G. Eick , Justin Mauger, Alan Ratner
• An Automated Approach for the Optimization of Pixel Based Visualizations;
  Jörn Schneidewind, Mike Sips, Daniel A. Keim
• Visual Analysis of Historic Hotel Visits;
  Chris Weaver, David Fyfe, Anthony Robinson, Deryck Holdsworth, Donna Peuquet, Alan M. MacEachren

List of Graph Visualization tools

List of Graph Visualization tools from http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/community/tools.cfm

Easy - Bubbl.us - MindGenius - MindMapper - ConceptDraw - Axon - MindManager - Freemind - HMC concept map - Microsoft Visio - Visual Mind - XML 3D Node Diagram Medium - Inxight StarTree - Wandora - Hypergraph - JGraph - aiSee - Graph Visualization Framework - GUESS - Welkin Advanced - Adobe Flash - Processing - VVVV: A multipurpose toolkit - Prefuse            - Graphviz - H3Viewer - yFiles - Walrus

Other Resources

- CAIDA Directory - SourceForge Directory - INSNA Directory - Google Directory - Wikipedia Directory - graphdrawing.org - List of Mind Mapping Software - List of Concept Mapping Software - Open Source Graphs in Java

visualcomplexity.com

from http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
methods: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/method.cfm
trends: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/trend.cfm

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

 

From:  http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html
One page PDF with links to EACH example: periodic_table-one-page.pdf
Full paper: a-periodic-table-of-visualization-methods.pdf

Counter:

Anyone looking for an encyclopedic reference for data visualization should consider Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, by Robert L. Harris. (from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=81)

Fascinated about visualization models and tools (Gallery 1)

 http://prefuse.org/

DocuBurst by Christopher Collins Uncertainty Lattices by Christopher Collins   sense.us by Heer, Viégas, and Wattenberg   StudiAnalyse by Christoph Gerstle and Florian Moritz   Enron Explorer by Trampoline Systems   Social Action by Adam Perer Nearword by Gregory Vaughan 34all by Martin Dudek Zone Manager by Martin Dudek timeVis by Can Altineller Small-World Networks by Stephen Frowe Ingram

NameVoyager by Martin Wattenberg, rebuilt by Jeffrey Heer ¢ongress by Jeffrey Heer zipdecode by Ben Fry, rebuilt by Jeffrey Heer TreeMap Demo by Jeffrey Heer RadialGraphView Demo by Jeffrey Heer TreeView Demo by Jeffrey Heer GraphView Demo by Jeffrey Heer FisheyeMenu Demo by Jeffrey Heer DataMountain Demo by Jeffrey Heer Vizster by Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd Flow Map Layout by Doantam

 PDF archive: vis.pdf