A cou­ple of months ago, I came across a very insight­ful arti­cle with high rel­e­vance for infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion: “More with less” in the always excel­lent ACM inter­ac­tions. It made me think quite a bit, and might also help some to under­stand a designer’s approach to visu­al­iza­tion a bit bet­ter, so here is the gist of the story (the fol­low­ing sec­tion mostly para­phrases the orig­i­nal article).

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Just a quick post to let you know that I put a new project online: revisit – a real–time visu­al­iza­tion of the last few hun­dred tweets around a topic. In con­trast to the usual twit­ter walls, it try to cap­ture some of the tem­po­ral dynam­ics as well as the con­ver­sa­tional aspects of twit­ter. Scroll down for cus­tomiza­tion options! Hope you like it — it will be at dis­play at the see con­fer­ence tomor­row, but for those of you who are not there, here is the live ver­sion so you can see what you are missing :)

In Novem­ber 2009, I did a mini-project together with Boris Müller and the boys from rau­reif. My task was to cre­ate a visu­al­iza­tion of the sur­vey results of an event. The par­tic­i­pants were asked to rate the events with respect to 9 ques­tions on a scale from 1–10. As we did not have much time (nor bud­get), we went for the first good-looking idea avail­able. What could that be? Right, a radial visu­al­iza­tion (be damned, cir­cles for non-circular data!). Any­ways, I pro­duced a quick funky mockup with ran­dom data: Each cir­cle sec­tor stands for one person’s rat­ings, and these are ordered by their aver­age rat­ing. For each sin­gle rat­ing, I draw a semi-transparent wedge, with dis­tance from cen­ter as well as color indi­cat­ing the rating’s value. Spe­cial treat­ment is pro­vided for the over­all event rat­ing (a more opaque, smaller wedge). For visual spice, a black spline con­nects all the aver­age val­ues of the ratings.

So, we agreed on it and shipped it. See­ing it with the real data, how­ever, made me won­der if I should have looked into typ­i­cal rat­ing sta­tis­tics a bit more :)

Well. Les­son learnt. It is a nice lit­tle visu­al­iza­tion nevertheless.

Which reminds me of an excel­lent arti­cle about how to pre­vent to uni­form votes already in the interface.

As a bonus, here is a lit­tle remake using pro­to­vis with again, ridicu­lously few lines of code: (more…)

I am excited to announce the fol­low­ing sym­po­sium at FH Potsdam:

The sym­po­sium »Liv­ing with Infor­ma­tion: Archi­tec­ture and Visu­al­iza­tion« (Octo­ber 16 , 2009 at FH Pots­dam) will jux­ta­pose expe­ri­ences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from prac­ti­tion­ers in the fields of design, archi­tec­ture and tech­nol­ogy. Guided by five cen­tral ques­tions, we will explore future trends in infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion, the rela­tion­ship of visu­al­iza­tion tools and cre­ativ­ity plus issues like infor­ma­tion over– and underload.

I am really look­ing for­ward to the unique speaker com­bi­na­tion we put together:

• Miguel Car­doso from bes­tiario,
• Paolo Ciuc­carelli from Politec­nico Milano /den­sity design,
• Georgi Kobi­larov from FU Berlin / dbpe­dia,
• Nor­bert Palz (CV + info) and
• Andrew Vande Moere from infosthetics.com!

In addi­tion, Prof. Boris Müller and I will pro­vide a rear-mirror view and out­look of our activ­i­ties related to the MACE project… A wide spec­trum, but hope­fully all held together by the cen­tral issue of the work­shop and the five ques­tions we pre­pared for the speakers.

Hope to see you there – reg­is­ter soon — space is limited!

On a related note, the Potsdam–based W3C office opens on the day before, which should be quite inter­est­ing, too.

Here’s a new project of mine:

X by Y visu­al­izes all sub­mis­sions to the prix ars elec­tron­ica, from the early begin­nings in 1987 up to 2009. The goal is to char­ac­ter­ize the “ars world” in quan­ti­ta­tive terms. A series of dia­grams groups and jux­ta­poses the sub­mis­sions by years, cat­e­gories, prizes and coun­tries. The graph­ics are com­posed of lit­tle dots (each rep­re­sent­ing a sin­gle sub­mis­sion) to pro­vide a visual scale for the sta­tis­ti­cal state­ments and the­ma­tize the rela­tion of the total­ity and the individual.

Their place­ment is com­puted with a Fibonacci series, imi­tat­ing the arrange­ment of sun­flower seeds – a very effi­cient and visu­ally mes­mer­iz­ing way of pack­ing small ele­ments into a large cir­cle. Color dis­tin­guishes the sub­mis­sion cat­e­gories, and a dia­mond shape marks sub­mis­sion that have been awarded a prize. The num­bers in the cen­ter of the dia­gram ele­ments are con­structed by skip­ping points in the pat­tern – estab­lish­ing a tight con­nec­tion between the num­ber and the indi­vid­u­als, but also demon­strat­ing the dual­ity of the two concepts.

The project is cur­rently at dis­play at the his­tory lounge of ars elec­tron­ica 09.

The project was done in coop­er­a­tion with the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for media.art.research. Find all dia­grams and some more info here: X by Y. Also, don’t miss the other works on the poster over at vis.mediaartresearch.at.

At the moment, I am dig­ging through a cou­ple of data­bases for an upcom­ing project. I did not really find a tool to quickly get an overview over a large set of cat­e­gor­i­cal data. So I decided to roll my own and write a lit­tle node­box script that walks over a CSV file, deter­mines all the unique value attrib­utes, counts how often they occur and plots the out­put as an area chart. The tool is good for get­ting a quick overview of cat­e­gor­i­cal data, esp. miss­ing val­ues and the data diversity.

Down­load the dbcounter script includ­ing a sam­ple data set of the Titanic pas­sen­gers. (needs node­box — OS X only)

Sam­ple pdf output

On a related note, you can also use the freshly released Par­al­lel Sets appli­ca­tion by Robert Kosara to deter­mine rela­tion­ships between the attrib­utes. But that’s step 2 :)

On another related note, I can­not stress enough how awe­some python is.

We recently launched a whole new ver­sion of the MACE por­tal. MACE (Meta­data for Archi­tec­tural Con­tents in Europe) is a pan-european ini­tia­tive to inter­con­nect and dis­sem­i­nate dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion about archi­tec­ture. The idea is to con­nect and enrich var­i­ous data­bases con­tain­ing eLearn­ing mate­r­ial for archi­tec­tural con­tents and to con­nect and make them acces­si­ble in novel ways. The project is co-funded by the Euro­pean com­mis­sion. If you are more inter­ested in the back­ground of the project, you can also view our info page here. Per­son­ally, I am work­ing half of my time on this project here at FH Potsdam.

So, let me give you a lit­tle overview of the por­tal: (more…)

I just came back from the great work­shop “The Scent of Infor­ma­tion” orga­nized by the visu­al­iza­tion gang from LBI Linz. (pro­gram + live-blog) Here are the slides from my talk. Basi­cally, I was pre­sent­ing Andrew vande Moere’s and Andrea Lau’s tri­an­gle model of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics, and showed mostly well-formed.eigenfactor and briefly some of my the­sis work.

Some strik­ing nature-inspired gen­er­a­tive visu­al­iza­tions can be found over at Imi­tate and infor­mate. From the site:

This is an exper­i­men­tal visu­al­iza­tion project. We are inspired by nature or other real phe­nom­ena and try to trans­form for­mal aspects of it into data visu­al­iza­tion systems.

Imi­tate and Infor­mate is a project by Cedric Kiefer and Christo­pher Warnow. It emerged from a course called “Real­ity in Vir­tu­al­ity” at Pots­dam Uni­ver­sity of Applied Sci­ences, Prof. Dani­jela Djokic.

Finally, the results of a coop­er­a­tion with the guys from eigen­fac­tor are online!

For the impa­tient: here’s the direct link: http://well-formed.eigenfactor.org

The site fea­tures 4 dif­fer­ent visu­al­iza­tions, try­ing dif­fer­ent approaches to map­ping infor­ma­tion flow and cita­tion struc­ture in the sciences.

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