High Line Record

[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/6939976 width=640 height=400]
High Line Record or also known on the internet as the Sound of New York City is a visualization by Mark Edward who has visualized an area of New York. The area is categorized by the type of business(bars, pubs, cafes, nightclubs, parks etc.) and their daily working hours. The distance of the business is the radius from the center and the arc denotes the time for which the business is open (top being 12am and the bottom being 12pm). To supplement, he takes recordings from the places and adds to the visualization. The interesting thing is that in one glance, one can figure out what kind of businesses are there in the vicinity with their working hours and noise level to expect. I wonder if there was a way to represent the intensity of the noise as an overlay graph, or how busy these areas were.

Social Memories

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5vkQGSOsZRc]
This is a visualization of the facebook profile by Nicholas Felton. It is essentially like the facebook timeline. The visualized data is reported in form of a 28 pages book with all the events and statistics compiled together. It can be accessed as a facebook book and it highly interactive. The beauty of the project lies in the simplicity of thought combined with interesting statistics which would not occur to an average facebook user, which makes the experience compelling.

Drawing Water

Drawing Water visualizes the movement of water across the US, from where it falls to where it is ultimately consumed. The graphic was developed in Cinder by David Wicks for the UCLA D|MA thesis exhibition Tell them nothing of the things I thought about and created while I was sleeping and uses water consumption data provided by the USGS and rainfall data provided by NOAA/NWS scraped and parsed in Python. I like this piece particularly for its clarity and visual impact. It is difficult to find visualizations that are beautiful and yet still give a clear impression of the data from the first glance.

My Daily Palatte

A very simple non-techy sort of info visualization that I quite like. Jacobo Zanella, divides his body up into 100 squares and denotes what colors he is comprised of that day, every day.

Cinemetrics

Film visualization has been done before in many forms, but Cinemetrics stood out for me as being one of the most clear and comprehensive while still being visually beautiful. The visualization is an interactive application that displays film palates throughout the course of the movie, its chapters, and the intensity of movement in those sectors.

Tele-Present Water

This installation uses static data collected from one voyage over Lake Superior. Recording wave g-force and acceleration data from the trip, the movement of the water is recreated via mechanical grid.

http://www.onehourpersecond.com/

I absolutely love this. I believe the most successful data visualizations are those that combine an innately interesting comparison with very arresting visuals. Though I cannot say this particular project has jaw dropping eye candy, the execution and the use of full screen comparative illustrations worked really well. I think with these data visualizations, it comes back to the creating that level of depth. If the same visualization was about data that was more literal, the impact would not nearly be as great. This is pretty much obvious, but sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the visual “cool” factor of data visualizations, concerned more about the visual complexity and “ooooh” factor than where the real beauty lies in the data. I guess finding the data in the first place is the true hunt.

Whooaaa. This is actually pretty neat because I actually saw this at an art festival in The Hague while I was abroad in the Netherlands, but totally forgot about it. Firstly, the interface is wicked neato. I wish I had the skill to fuss over details like how the visualizations fade in and out or other ways of representing the data kinetically instead of the usual static poster-y infographic. It’s incredible how kinetic visualization adds such a powerful dimension to information, in fact judging by where communication design is heading, kinetic visualizations should be incorporated into the regular cirriculum. Anyways, this kind of stuff is definitely pretty cool.

Another gnarly one hailing from my homestate of California. In kind of an ‘aw, shucks’ moment, I had a similar idea for this project. However, instead of taking videos of the sky for a year, I desired to take snapshots of the Pittsburgh sky, color average them, and see if there’s any kind of link to the choice of key words in the Twitterverse during that hour. Anyways, I think this is another example of taking an overlooked aspect of our life and changing the way we perceive it. In a sense, I guess that’s what the basic foundation of what art is supposed to do, expose us to different perspectives and change the way we think in an ever so subtle way leaving us with new refreshing thoughts. I guess what I need to figure out is where my abstract thinking and my (not)awesome programming skills intersect.

Empires Decline is an animated visualization of the historical rise and fall of major western imperial powers since 1800. The British, Spanish, French and Portuguese empires are each visualized as amorphous blobs that split and swell each time a territory is added or subtracted. The best moments are those of dramatic change; for example the declaration of independence in 1776 or French decolonization in 1960. The artist could have done more to capitalize on these events, perhaps using zoom or color to heighten tension just before a break.

Fühlometer is an enormous neon smiley face mounted atop a lighthouse in berlin. Its mouth rotates to reflect the mood of the city, as determined by facial analysis software running on nearby pedestrians. Much like the Green Cloud in Helsinki, Fühlometer becomes a public spectacle in plain view. I wouldn’t change a thing about the project, but Twitter sentiment analysis could be used to gather firmer mood readings if desired.

Sync/Lost is an interactive installation that allows multiple users to collaboratively browse the history of electronic dance music. Each user selects a musical genre using a wiimote and those tracks are mashed-up in real time. The evolution of EDM is a personal interest in mine, and Sync/Lost does a good job of displaying this information in a spatially intuitive way. However, interaction seems clunky. A turntable would have been a better controller for users to achieve tactile feedback on their selections.

VoteEasy is a cool website which aims to help voters make an informed decision. It provides a lot of data about candidates in a digestible format. It also lets the voter input their own stance on key issues so that the candidate can be measured at a glance against the voter’s political leanings.

Pig 05049 is a book that visualizes all the products that a single pig ended up in. I think this is a really interesting piece. The sources of our food and other products are generally obscured and this book serves as a very honest confrontation with modern manufacturing and food industries. The results are surprising. Apparently three years of research went into the book.

This is a visualization of Lisbon’s traffic by Pedro Miguel Cruz and Penousal Machado. It uses gps data from taxis collected over a month and then condensed to show an average day. The orange areas represent traffic jams or slow moving traffic. The visualization is more beautiful than informative but with some study it could be used to determine routes to avoid problematic traffic areas.

CHICAGO BOUNDARIES

I remember someone was interested in urban areas- this shows a map of chicago with boundaries drawn by populations of ethnicity instead of the “city neighborhoods”

Colours in Culture

This shows how different cultures associate ideas and emotions with colors. The graphic is very fun to explore and pick apart, but it is a little annoying to have to go back and find what a number references each time. Maybe interactivity could help this?

How long do animals live?

This simple print infographic compares how long different animals live on average. I think this is interesting data and enjoy how the animals are simply placed along a line.

The piece tries to add additional information, by color coding the different types of animals (mammals, birds, other vertebrates, invertebrates) but it is easy information to miss because the key is small, in black&white and at the bottom.

I wonder if this content could be beefed up with interactive filters or tangible menu control.. does the size of the animal or other factors affect its life span?

The Sexperience 100

http://sexperienceuk.channel4.com/the-sexperience-1000#/

“Welcome to The Sexperience 1000, an interactive journey through the sexual experiences and preferences of one thousand British individuals. What’s the favourite sexual position of iPhone users in the North? Do country music lovers over 55 prefer to do it in the dark? Explore the 20 questions of our survey and discover what the great British public get up to between the sheets…”

I like this interactive infographic because it animates a bunch of little people moving around as you change the survey question or filter. At any point you can hover over a person and get their age and location. This make the statistics seem more real & trustworthy, because you can SEE that real people answered the questions. It is also interesting that you can watch specific people move between the different filters… you can *star* a person to follow them throughout all of the questions, or see their answers to all of the questions.

There a tons of layers to explore in this infographic, that makes a somewhat taboo subject easily accessible and friendly. This is a good example of a social experience that friends would enjoy gathering around, and comparing reactions.

How Music Travels

http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html

This animation visualizes the time and place of music style/genre origins and trends. It shows how music evolved and moved across the world, changing & morphing as it encountered different areas and influences. I enjoy how the spread of sharing really picks up after the 70s and this change of pace is visible in the animation.

I think this could be improve if the different lineages were clickable & could be isolated or learned about. Or if you could play clips of what the music was like.

Urban Remix

Urban Remix is a project aimed at allowing others to communicate the soundscape of their communities. The platform consists of a mobile phone and web interface for recording, browsing, and mixing audio sounds together. Although, the creators of the project do not identify this project as a visualization, I find that I can listen to the audio tracks to get a sense of the rhythm of the city or community they were recorded in: noisy vs quiet, trains vs birds. The project creators call this the acoustic identity of these communities. I think this might be something that’s missing when we’re looking/exploring a place on Google Maps, for example. One way this could be improved is to mash it using data associated with these soundscapes or make these soundscapes tangible. The audio clips are already laid out on a map, but there might be other information like timestamps that could be used. Acoustic Poetry (link) is one attempt at making soundscapes tangible: soundscapes are interpreted and mapped to poetry that are displayed to users (the primary target user is deaf).

Project Fühlometer

How Music Travels

http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html

This is an animated flow chart that shows how music travels around the world by genre made by the British Travel service, Thomson. It is is neat to watch and clearly shows the relationships and trends of how music spreads in popularity around the world. You can watch the whole timeline- starting at 1800-2000, or click on a decade. The spacing of the timeline is a bit confusing- there is the same amount of space for a century and a decade. I also think it would be cool, if you could isolate by genre- I thought the colored buttons on the bottom did this but the do not do anything…Still a neat tool to use if you want to learn a bit about the evolution of music.

MSNBC Hurricane Tracker

This was made by Stamen for MSNBC weather, much like the NYTimes hurricane tracker. This interactive map shows the path of the hurricane and allows you to zoom in on a specific point to get information about the wind and direction. There is a 3 color code for current, previous and forecast conditions, along with an animation showing how the storm is traveling. You can get a lot of information about the current location of the storm, but it is a bit confusing to navigate through. There is a lot of information available in layers and the first layer give a good summary of what is going on. It might be better to sift through some of the information and either merge or get rid of some layers at it can be a bit overwhelming to be bombarded with so much information. There is a also a neat historical storm map showing paths of past storms.

Planetary cycles from 10th century

This is a very interesting graph of the planets. It clearly shows different patterns of travel throughout time, but the shape of the orbits is unclear. There is no real evidence of how the orbits behaved, except for in relation to one another. The orbits appear to be wave functions with different amplitudes. They could be interpreted to interfere with each other, or be parallel to each other. Considering what was known about the planets at this time, I think this is a pretty nice picture of what the trajectories may have been. Knowing everything we know, or rather I know about planets now, it is hard to not want to relate the lines to this information. It would be interesting to see an updated version of it based on the facts we have discovered since it was made.

The Interactive ZIPScribble Map

ZipScribble Map
This info graphic is beautiful in my opinion. Using only black and white, with basic map interactivity it creates a really fun experience. I found myself looking at different countries and checking out how they look with our without the map, as the instructions suggested. It also made me want to share, and see if any of the countries are of people I know. As for the more practical side, while the website suggests that interesting information can be inferred from the piece, I highly doubt it. It’s just cool, but nothing more.

Wifi Light Painting

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

This piece is just awesome. The artists took something that exists in our environment – wifi signals and found a very interesting way to visualize it. They use long-exposure photographs over scenic parts of the city, while a person is walking with a wifi-signal sensitive rod with lights on it. The result is an imaginary cross section of the wifi signal strength, overlaid on top of the real world. I like the fact that this could have been done on photoshop, but was still physically done at the field by people. I also like to think about other “invisible” entities that we can map this way, starting from radio and cell-tower signal, air-pollution, smell and noise just to name a few.