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.

The well-formed.eigenfactor project will be at display at the Information Aesthetics Showcase, curated by Victoria Szabo, at SIGGRAPH 2009, August 3–7 in New Orleans. I will also give a little Monday morning talk on the project and am really excited to be part of this first intrusion of the information aesthetics scene into the conference on computer graphics!

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.

For those from the Stuttgart area: I will give a public (german) talk on Monday, April 20, 6:30pm at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd on information aesthetics and my work.

Update: lecture slides here. Thanks to Eric Rodenbeck and the other see#4 speakers for some last minute inspirations!

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…)

Together with Sebastian Ferré, I defined and illustrated some common navigation modes in faceted search and web applications dealing with metadata+resources in general for an upcoming publication. I am here sharing the gist of it already, as I believe these could be interesting for many of you.

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Today was a good day, so I thought I would share its results immediately, instead of fine-tuning forever – who knows when I find the time anyways!

I built a little facet browser for the New York Times Article Search API - an impressively fast faceted search engine covering over two million articles. So, give it a spin!

Some caveats:

• Don’t look for the page navigation – there is none. Pure laziness, will update it soon.
• The initial counts are based on a search for “the” (which I figured would appear in all articles). Unfortunately, only the top 15 or so values per facet are returned, so you cannot click, e.g. the year 2008 in the beginning. Will fix.
• The API has a request limit of 5000 queries per day. So if your requests don’t work – come back tomorrow morning :)
• Unfortunately, the API seems to support only one value per facet. So, all facets are single-select.(fixed, see comments).

The code is based on my totally revamped elastic lists prototype. I used this project as a little sandbox experiment of how easy customization is possible, and especially how to make a switch from a fully client-based to a server–based filtering model.

I put up a new portfolio site at moritz.stefaner.eu. Not really finished, but good enough. You might be especially interested in the Content Landscape documentation, as I have not written about this project before.

After lots of experiments with drupal, indexhibit and wordpress, I finally settled for the simple and elegant frog cms. Highly recommended, if you want to fill a custom layout with dynamic content in a very flexible manner.

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.