PLANET infovis

On this side of the planet, the summer has just started. Hence infosthetics is finally taking a long break to get away from it all, and will enjoy the western side of its spectacular host country in a +2,500km (+1,500 miles) motorhome road trip. Naturally, postings will be dramatically less for the next weeks, unless you really want to hear about some gorges, beaches, dolphins, whale sharks, and the inevitable sunburn.

You might want to consider to browse through some of the previous posts or explore the infosthetics, visit some [fusioncharts.com] of the [techsmith.com] great sponsors [visualthesaurus.com] on the right side, or explore the infosthetics or HistoryShots shops to discover some great presents for your data-addicted friends and family. Casual visitors should also subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified when infosthetics is back up and running on its normal cruise speed.

FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.

Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words. Frequency change measures the difference in frequency as a percentage: greener words are unusually popular; redder words are the opposite.

Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract over time.

Keith Peters is a generative artist who works mostly in ActionScript 3.0. The images shown here are just part of a growing body or remarkable work which he showcases on his website Art From Code. The quality of the work is almost as impressive as Keith's unpretentiousness. As he explains: "Sometimes I make something that looks nice and put it up here. I call it 'generative art' (...) Other people have different ideas on exactly what generative art means, or what a piece has to consist of or what should have gone into it in order for it to merit that title. So it's up to you what you want to call it. I hope you like how some of them look anyway".

The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey [spatialkey.com] is marketed as a "next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System". It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from "Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)" to "San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)"

In practice, users can view and overlay all sorts of "geo-temporal data" (data with recorded location and time information) and generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map. The current visualization templates include three different map rendering techniques: heat map, heat grid and graduated circles.

left: Geo-phages infecting an unsuspecting coastline at Pruned Right: Slow Decay at Bldblog (Detail of Yvette Molina’s work) Pruned compiles a catalogue of coastal curiosities with an image of ‘Geo-phages infecting an unsuspecting coastline’. Of particular interest to disciples of self-similarity are the iterations produced by coastal engineering and erosion prevention. Bldblog’s post, Resampled Space [...]

Doodle Buzz [doodlebuzz.com] is an online news aggregator with a visual twist. Users are requested to submit their favorite news theme or topic, and to draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place, messed-up, scribbled line on the white canvas. The line is then used as the framework to layout the headlines, summaries and related topics. The aim is to create an entirely new way of exploring information, one that allows for a kind of "quiet chaos" that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. The data is fetched from DayPI, a recent service by DayLife that allows a new architecture of online news.

The visually chaotic and more playful approach towards exploring news seems like an interesting alternative to the more scientific-looking network graphs of news already out there, such as News Visual, Muckety, SiloBreaker, Libero, TextMap and CNET News Ontology.

Japanese TV station WOWOW has a feature on their site that lets you mix a video of a live Radiohead performance [wowow.co.jp] from the Saitama Super Stadium leg of their 2008 Japanese tour. A set of quite aesthetic data visualizations accompanies this online music video mix tool.

The video interface allows you to choose from 12 colour-coded cameras to record your own "rainbow" (the song 15 Step is the opening track from Radiohead's In Rainbows album). You can then play back your edit by clicking and dragging the playhead in the timeline, or view charts of the most popular shots (click on the two buttons on the right side, or see the screenshots below. There's some impressive juggling going on behind the scenes to keep the video playing as you hop from camera to camera, and I am always a fan of sites that don't worry about pixellation and opt for full screen content regardless.

left: “Impulsfeldstudien” (Nautilus II) - Jorinde Voigt Right: “Impulsfeldstudien” (Nautilus II) (detail) - Jorinde Voigt At the core of Jorinde Voigt’s drawings lays the proposition of a system or set of systems, with many individual parts collaborating and corroborating harmonically. Networked elements are connected, like a sketch for visual programming project, forcing the [...]

Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments by Troika has just been released in the UK (US in Feb 2009). Buy online.

SIOC.ME [sioc.me] is a "real-time interactive visualization of boards.ie semantic data in three-dimensional space". The project was originally submitted for entry to the Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition that, based on over 10 years of online discussion and around 9 million documents, invited submissions to create something which uses the data in an interesting manner.

The visualization allows a user to select a forum from boards.ie and explore it within a 3D space throughout various spatial configurations (i.e. Carousel, Linear, Stacked, Random or Grid). One can either watch a small set of demonstration movies below, or try out the application live at online.

Three more animated infographic video that have not yet appeared on infosthetics. They seem to be particularly noteworthy, as they avoid using the now pervasive slick "animated infographic" style originally introduced by Google Master Plan, Iraq War Conspiracy, Electronic Surveillance Critique and Hidden Cost of Iraq War.

The three movies illustrate the relationship between nature and sugar, explain the sports football, and introduce the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator concept.

Vizzl [vizzl.com] is a new visual search / shopping engine that allows users to perform dynamic filtering, sorting and a number of view modes on all the search results retrieved from Amazon, eBay or YouTube.

As a new Adobe Flex based application, Vizzl features dynamic animations and transitions to deliver a more immersive search experience, in an aim to make searching information "fun and fast". For example, Amazon books can be sorted by relevance, best selling, price, alphabet, or release date, while views can be changed to reveal more or less detailed information.

The Living Calendar allows people to read the weeks, the months, the holidays, and the time, all at once and all in a glance. A large hand shows the current day, and the current month, thus doing a complete turn during 365 days. A little hand shows the current day of week, and the current hour, and accordingly does a complete turn for 7 days. Moreover, the calendar marks the date of public holidays, religious events and momentous days.

According to the echo chamber that is the blogosphere, this clock can be yours for $94,950 (yep).

left: Box Pyramid Top - Sublue Right: Nabla - Syntopia Structure Synth is an application for creating complex three-dimensional structures using simple rule sets. Using a few line of code, with statements condensed to a few characters, iterated multiforms can be generated consisting of thousands of individual objects. Developed by Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen, this free [...]

left: System5_14-MstogRnd01 - Frank Berg Right: Collage 11/30/07 - Mumblion Frank Bergs Progress set documents experiments involving Delaunay triangulation, networks, maze building algorithms, circle packing and Voronoi diagrams, and at times combining more than one of these in the same system. Restricting the palette to just black and white accentuates the structures and configurations - [...]

Life Flowcharts [lifeflowcharts.com] is a community-authored flowchart based on the topic of how to live one's life. The system is based on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) / Vector Markup Language (VML), and programmed within the Google App Engine. Users authenticated by Google can add, reconnect or reorder children boxes, or comment on, and vote on, individual decision boxes.

Thnkx Zeno.

Calculated Movements, by Larry Cuba, is composed of syncopated geometric elements that move through space, re-arranging nested versions of themselves in synchronicity - the work is strongly reminiscent of Oscar Fischinger’s pioneering animations. Like robotic wyldestyle glyphs the elements insinuate some kind of hermetic mathematical ordering or purpose. Made in 1980, it’s the last computer [...]

The recently released book "Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design" available at Amazon.com and Gestalten.de seems to be an ideal Christmas gift. The book introduces an expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams, and presents an abundant range of possibilities in visualizing data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams. Or, put differently: "The more concrete the variables, the more aesthetically elaborate the graphics - sometimes reaching the point of art - the more abstract, the simpler the readability."

While infosthetics would *love* a review copy to be featured on this blog, some teaser images of the book seem already quite seducing, and the online video trailer quite appetizing. Thnkx Jonas.

There is an interesting blog post over at wallstats.com (well known from the Death and Taxes), analyzing and critiquing some of the recent charts and graphs created by the US Pentagon. It demonstrates how the graphics coming out of each branch of the military are vastly different. For instance, the Navy's graphics are less polished with a focus on line charts and the occasional concept map, while the Air Force really goes over the top, from "baffling to well, more baffling".

The article raises the issue that these documents are used to brief major decision makers, and asks the question "Why does the Department of Defense, which is an economy the size of Turkey, put out such inconsistent and poor visualizations?".