Everybody complains that art, design and research in information visualization should be talking more to each other.

Here is a unique opportunity: Andrew Vande Moere and I will be hosting a symposium at IV10: DAVis, the 5th International Symposium on Design and Aesthetics in Visualisation.

From the call:

“This symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of design, art and related disciplines. The goal is to share their stories and experiences on how the needs and goals of both users and businesses are met through information visualisation.

It supports the publication of research in two general domains: Design and Aesthetics. Design refers to the development of visualisation as a creative design process. Aesthetics refers to the role of user experience in visualisation, as understood in three distinct components: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience.

This symposium presents an opportunity to explore these issues and their consequences for the field of information visualization. In particular, we encourage the submission of design critiques; case studies, possibly with accompanying evaluation studies or critical reflections; position papers; or reports on the impact that visualization research or visualization use has had on the work and life of people. In this context, the story of failures or abandoned approaches can be as informative as descriptions of success. The fields of application are open, and can reach from traditional screen-based graphs, over innovative multi-touch interfaces, to dynamic media architecture displays.”

So – designers, coders, artists, visualizers – go forth and write!

Update: make sure to check out the submission requirements and procedure up at the IV main page.

Beware: the deadline is tight: March 1. March 21 But honestly, you would not have started earlier, anyways – right? Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, and we are really looking forward to your submissions.

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:

var data=[ ["05.11.09 17:01", 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10] // .. etc .., see page source for full data ]; // pre-process data var processedData = []; data.forEach(function(d) { var o={}; o.date = Date.parse(d[0], "%d.%m.%y %H:%M"); o.dayDate = new Date(o.date.getFullYear(), o.date.getMonth(), o.date.getDate()); o.dayTime = o.date.getHours(); d.shift(); o.ratings = d; o.mean = pv.mean(d); processedData.push(o); }); // sort by rating processedData = processedData.sort(function(a,b) a.mean - b.mean); // result: // [{date:..., ratings:[10,2,3,4...], mean:6.7}, ... // set up visualization var w = 440, h =440; var vis = new pv.Panel() .width(w) .height(h) .left(20) .top(20) ; // encoders var color = pv.Scale.linear(0, 5, 10).range("rgba(255,0,0,.3)", "rgba(200,200,0,.3)", "rgba(0,90,0,.3)"); var angle = pv.Scale.linear(0, processedData.length).range(Math.PI1.5, Math.PI3.5); var radius = pv.Scale.linear(0, 10).range(100, 200); // A panel for each rating event var panel = vis.add(pv.Panel) .data(processedData) .left(function() w.5)
.top(function() h.5) ; // a wedge for each rating value panel.add(pv.Wedge) .data(function(d) d.ratings) .startAngle(function() angle(this.parent.index)) .endAngle (function() angle(this.parent.index+1)) .innerRadius(function(d) radius(d) ) .outerRadius(function(d) radius(d+1)) .fillStyle(function(d) color(d)) ; panel.add(pv.Wedge) .data(function(d) [d.mean]) .startAngle(function() angle(this.parent.index)) .endAngle (function() angle(this.parent.index+1)) .innerRadius(function(d) radius(d+.5) ) .outerRadius(function(d) radius(d+.7)) .fillStyle(function(d) "#000") ; vis.render();

On the occasion of the recent fifth birthday of infosthetics.com blog, your premier source for fresh projects from visualization and information aesthetics, I made a custom adaptation of the elastic lists principle for the – up to now – 1950 posts of the site. Try it out, and read more about it here.

Happy birthday infosthetics!

Andrew Vande Moere from FHP Interface Design on Vimeo.

Paolo Ciuccarelli from FHP Interface Design on Vimeo.

Find the whole album here.

I contributed to the user interface design chapter in the recent Springer book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search – Theory, Practice, and Experience” (online version) edited by Giovanni Maria Sacco and Yannis Tzitzikas. Based on a definition of core principles and challenges, the chapter presents a taxonomy of navigation modes observed in existing applications. On that basis, design patterns for enabling these navigation modes in user interfaces as well as extensions and related approaches are discussed. The chapter closes with a section on personalizing faceted search.

The book itself covers a wide range of topics and current research questions related to Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search from an academic point of view.

You can find a pre-print version of the User Interface Design chapter here. Thanks also to my co–authors Sébastian Ferré, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren and Yi Zhang!

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.

Together with my colleagues in Seattle and Umea, I modified the “change over time” visualization to tell a specific story: The formation of neuroscience as a field of its own right over the last decade. Originally scattered across related disciplines (such as medicine, molecular and cell biology or neurology), the neuroscientific journals start to define a niche of their own, reflected in the dense cluster emerging in 2005.

Download a larger version with full explanatory text here: png (1MB) pdf (4MB)

And here is some more in depth info: First, almost 8000 scientific journals are clustered into groups, based on their citation patterns, and using the map equation (demo, paper). In short, for a network partitioned into groups, the map equation specifies the theoretical limit of how concisely we can describe a trajectory of a random walker on the network. Therefore, minimizing the map equation over all possible network partitions reveals regularities of information flow across directed and weighted networks or, in our case, the structure of how citations flow through science.

Second, using the Eigenfactor™ Score, the journals are assigned a measure of importance – much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the importance of web pages. The Eigenfactor™ Score measures the percentage of time that researchers would spend with the respective journal, if they were to move through the network by randomly following citations in the journals.

This process is repeated in two-year chunks from 1999–2007, in order to capture changes in clustering and shifts in importance over the years. For this diagram, we picked only the clusters relevant to the formation of neuroscience.

In the visualization, each cluster occupies a vertical column block in the respective year’s column, further subdivided into a block for each journal. Each journal is connected with a horizontal band over the years. The height of each journal reflects the Eigenfactor Score. All journals in the cluster that corresponds to the field of neuroscience in year 2007 are highlighted to tell the story of the formation of this field of science. The coloring is based on the cluster assignments in the first year, 1999.

We use a subset of the citation data from Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports 1999–2007. The complete data aggregate, at the journal level, approximately 35,000,000 citations from almost 8000 journals over the past decade, but here we only display journals relevant to the formation of neuroscience.

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.

The exhibition – well curated by Victoria Szabo – featured a nice selection of a broad range of works, both from the usual suspects like stamen and Boris Müller, but also quite some works I was not yet familiar with. I especially enjoyed newsknitter, c-loc, the fabulous synchronous objects and Rhythm Analysis: A Temporal Stereopsis of Urban Telecommunication Data Topography.

I had a short presentation (slides) on Monday morning in front of roughly 70 people. I presented some of the process and rationale behind the well-formed.eigenfactor project, gave an overview of the data analysis and ended with some “outtakes” of discontinued approaches and my favorite bug screenshots, as I get a lot of inspiration out of bad code. Thanks to Nicole Coleman for the good organization and moderation!

The project talks were followed by a panel in the afternoon, where I was delighted to see, among others, Andrew Vande Moere and Kennth Huff talk about their work and perspective on infosthetics. Overall, however, the panel was very broad in topic and in sum, lacking a central question or some red lines. For the years to come, it might be an idea to tie panels, talks and exhibitions closer together.

The days flew by and it was a great experience to be at SIGGRAPH and the Big Easy – New Orleans. Jazz and Blues everywhere and a real good vibe. Made some new friends, learned a lot, and the scotch and music in the dba were not shabby either.