Just came across an inter­est­ing diploma the­sis by Daniel A. Becker, super­vised by Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen:

RANDOM WALK

WHAT DOES RANDOMNESS LOOK LIKE? RANDOM WALK asks this ques­tion and presents exper­i­ments in math­e­mat­ics and physics, show­ing the mys­te­ri­ous inter­ac­tion of chaos and order in ran­dom­ness. The project RANDOM WALK sim­u­lates ran­dom­ness in visu­al­iza­tions, which are easy to under­stand. In this way, it deliv­ers insight into a phe­nom­e­non, which has so far remained unexplained.

With the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions com­ing up tomor­row (excit­ing!), here is a lit­tle roundup of related visu­al­iza­tions and infor­ma­tion graph­ics I enjoyed: (more…)

See­ing Chris Jor­dan’s TED talk (embed­ded below) just made me remem­ber his great work in visu­al­iz­ing large num­bers of things going wrong.

About his lat­est project, Run­ning the num­bers, he writes:

Run­ning the Num­bers looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 32,000 breast aug­men­ta­tion surg­eries in the U.S. every month. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller pho­tographs. Employ­ing themes such as the near ver­sus the far, and the one ver­sus the many, I hope to raise some ques­tions about the role of the indi­vid­ual in a soci­ety that is increas­ingly enor­mous, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, and overwhelming.

David Huynh has recently joined the free­base team, after hav­ing worked on Exhibit and other SIMILE tools at MIT. His new project Par­al­lax is obvi­ously based on Exhibit (which fol­lowed mostly a faceted fil­ter­ing par­a­digm) but demon­strates a really inter­est­ing “side­wards brows­ing tech­nique” for nav­i­gat­ing related sets of dif­fer­ent types of entities.

As an exam­ple, you could start with a set of archi­tects, then fil­ter down to all mod­ern archi­tects, plot them on a map, a time­line etc. – quite nice already, but tra­di­tional facet brows­ing in prin­ci­ple. The catch how­ever, is that you can explore related col­lec­tions, like the <a href=“http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:’]);“Structures%20Designed’,p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/structures_designed))),s:(v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)))”>buildings they designed, their birth places etc. in the same manner. Very interesting principle and nicely executed, yet a bit hard to explain.

In this screencast, David explains it himself:
Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

As a side remark: academically, I think the Humboldt paper by Georgi Kobilarov first presented this principle (but they also refer to an earlier prototype of David's work). Unfortunately it was introduced under the name of pivot brows­ing, which is sort of reserved already for the quite related, but not iden­ti­cal prin­ci­ple intro­duced in dogear.

Any ideas for a good name? Side­wards brows­ing? Entity shift? Or just stick with parallax?

Automaten–Andreas cre­ated a beau­ti­ful new project together with Ben­jamin Maus:
Reflec­tion.

Essen­tially, the wave­forms of a musi­cal piece by Frans de Waard were ren­dered as a sculp­ture with a CNC Milling Machine.

This project sort of fol­lows a week in the life, another phys­i­cal visu­al­iza­tion, where a week of loca­tion data of the author is mapped in a wooden car­togram.

More visu­al­iza­tion videos! The See#3 con­fer­ence orga­nized by Scholz&Volkmer took place in Wies­baden this week­end, and luck­ily the streams are online. The speaker list includes Dr. Fritz Reuss­wig, Frank van Ham, Ben Fry, Julien de Smedt, Zachary Lieber­man + Bruce Sterling.

A real wow-project has gone into ver­sion 2: Exhibit. It is part of SIMILE, focussing on “Seman­tic Inter­op­er­abil­ity of Meta­data and Infor­ma­tion in unLike Envi­ron­ments”, which pro­vides a whole tool­box of prag­matic seman­tic web applications.

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