Foundations for Art, Design & Digital CultureMore Ideas to Visualize

Visualization should be seen as a technology.excerpts taken from The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo

Regarding Visualizations…

In other words, graphics should not simplify messages. They should clarify them, highlight trends, uncover patterns, and reveal realitites not visible before.The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo

http://visualizing.org/galleries/strata-conference-new-york

http://visualizing.org/full-screen/44136

{ see next slide}

www.wired.com/design/2013/08/how-segregated-is-your-city-this-eye-opening-map-shows-you/?viewall=true

This image is a screenshot from a real-time visualization of web traffic on a popular Dutch news website (nu.nl). This D3 visualization draws its inspiration from Hebbian Learning, which states that neurons that fire together, wire together. In our case, pages that fire together, wire together.

Each node in the graph is a page (news article) within the news website and connections between two pages means that someone navigated from one page to the other. The more often a page is visited, the larger the node becomes. The color of each node represents the news category of the page (e.g., business, sports, entertainment).

When the D3 visualization first starts, the canvas is entirely black. As people browse the news site, nodes and connections appear in real-time and the graph grows.

http://visualizing.org/visualizations/hebbian-tracking

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-billion-dollar-o-gram-2009/

See an animation at...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Pahd2X-eE

There’s a lot of talk of a new world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December to succeed Kyoto. I wondered how the signatories of the first one were doing. Make up your own mind.

As ever, this was difficult to research. A lot of the important data was locked in a huge European Environment Agency report. And then summarized by a byzantine graph. In the end I had to trawl through individual country reports to get the figures I needed.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/kyoto-whos-on-target/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/

More Processing

This is actually called a “relational operator.”( )

This is actually called a “relational operator.”( )

Homework

1) Be ready for what is due for Project 3.1 next week…

Deliverable 1: A simple text file that captures your data as numbers, words, or symbols. Deliverable 2: A visual sketch (in your visual diary) that describes your wearable and how the data is applied. Please deliver a copy of this. Deliverable 3: A one to one paper prototype of your wearable which you can wear and show on your body. This is prior to final piece in 3.2!!!

2) Read cairo_functionalArt.pdf

Read/Review pages 10-23, especially note “Drowning in Data? Only If You Don’t Know How to Swim” and “From Information to Wisdom”

Read pages 19-23 “Visualization as Technology”

Read pages 74-79, “Seek Depth”

Read pages 84 to the end of the pdf (pdf pages 23-37, many images - notice how these visualizations are created, notice the differences between infographics and visualizations) - read the interview