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.

Palin sentence diagrams

Two projects from Pitch Interactive

Job arcs

Donations

Neoformixhas a couple of interesting visualizations, mostly relating to speech analysis. I like this one best, as it really tells a compact story:

Stream graph: Obama’s one week speech

The NY Times info design department does not cease to amaze me:

The measure of a president

Can a president tame the business cycle?

Naming names

More lexical analysis and the windbag index from Martin Krzywinski:

Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates — who’s the Windbag?

Every moment now

Great discussion on proper plotting of the candidates’ tax plans (via Nature where I picked up the great term “couture visualization”)

The Visual Display of Political Information

Another vivid discussion on displaying swing state dynamics at eager eyes:

Swing states

And now, my dear American readers – get out and vote! May the youngest and best-looking win :)

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 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?

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.

Exhibit itself presents a “a three-tier web application framework written in Javascript, which you can include like you would include Google Maps.” An exhibit application typically consists of a content presentation area and several widgets for filtering, sorting and grouping the content presentation, following the faceted browsing paradigm also used in my elastic lists. Currently, the available widgets cover plain checkbox lists, maps, and timelines, and a live search.

From my first experiments with the tool, I can say it is really ridiculously easy to create custom views on existing data sets: Data can be imported “from a Google Spreadsheet, Excel spreadsheet, EditGrid spreadsheet, BibTex files or any JSONP data source” without much effort.

Applications are built by loading the exhibit script and then assigning “Exhibit roles” to layers in your java-script: For instance,

<div ex:role="facet" ex:expression=".discipline"
ex:facetLabel="Discipline" />

will create a filtering widget looking for values of the “discipline” property in your data set and display them as a list to be used for filtering. It couldn’t possibly be easier to build client-side facet browsing applications.

Other nifty are the integrated browser history for filtering steps and the ability to export filtered views as e.g. HTML, but also tab-separated text files, RDF, etc.

Check out the Getting started page to get an impression.

The down side, of course is, that all data has to be loaded on the client before the application can start. So we are rather speaking about hundreds than thousands of data items. Also, I would of course be interested in building custom widgets, however, this looks a wee bit more complicated from first looks into the code. And of course UI-wise, I would have some suggestions as well, but anyways, I find the project quite impressive already as it is!

Kudos to David Huynh and the rest of the team at MIT. More info can also be found in David Huynh’s PhD thesis.