I found Neri Oxman‘s work are really inspiring. In my opinion, nature is always the best creator. Nexi and her group draw inspirations from how nature form patterns and study different biological systems to computationally construct designs that according to the context of these objects.

Beef Stakes which is designed by Sarah Hallacher is a piece of work that I found it’s easy to understand the data and context of the visualization. instead of reading graph and numbers, there is the direct visual experience and I understand immediately it is about beef production and its data. I think this work has targeted on the very important aspect of data visualization that the purpose is to promote understanding of the audience.

Tatiana Plakhova is another talented artist/graphic designer whose art work is influenced by mathematics, nature, physics and music.

Information Visualization

Interesting: Fathom’s ‘Colorful Language’

This project visualizes the different color terms of different languages, and how different color swatches are grouped by speakers of those languages. I’m taking a color theory class right now and find the display beautiful, and it’s really fun to look at the unexpected differences between languages (highly differentiated color sets, or colors unexpectedly together in a set).

I find this data set interesting because my parents (native Vietnamese speakers)  have a fuzzy delineation of blue and green (which to me feels illogical, as I’m functionally a native English speaker and used to a clear delineation). There’s one term for blue-green in Vietnamese, and you have to specify “the blue-green of the sky”, “the blue-green of trees” in order to convey if it’s green or red. I’m also pretty fascinated by the fact that the evolution of color terms in different languages usually follows a particular order.

Provocative: Romy Achituv & Fathom’s “The Emotional Life of Books“

This project visualizes the emotional responses that people have to books in a particular library and maps out a history of emotional experiences from the readers as a whole. The books of the library are then rearranged according to their emotional histories.

I find this provocative because I sometimes resist (and I’m sure others do too) the idea of visualizing writing and reading and the content and the emotional experience computationally, since it seems like there are a lot of intangibles about what’s going on. But I like that this offers the idea that computational analysis of reading experiences can also offer some cool insights (and unexpected ones, because you turn up implicit patterns that people might not consciously acknowledge or see). In this project, depending on the categorization of the books in the library, the library is organized differently, so people’s emotional reactions are shaping to some degree how people find information in the library.

Well-crafted: Sam van Doorne’s “STYN”

STYN is an installation by Sam van Doorne where viewers/users/incipient artists lay down a piece of grid paper that gets covered with markings as they play pinball over it.

I like this and find it well-crafted because it visualizes the intangible experiences in everyday life. It’s kind of delightful to be able to see the patterns of pinball playing through the paint—it creates a very beautiful composition (art generated from human behavior!) and also serves as an abstract insight into physics and gameplay. I also love the idea of hacking existing objects into design tools.

Provocative: Ben Fry – ‘All Streets’
http://fathom.info/allstreets
Ben Fry’s ‘All Streets’ is a visualization of all the streets in the continental United States that looks like a topographical map.  Visualizing roads in this way might seem like it would just look like an unmarked map, however at this scale, the data reveals not only the topology of the United States, but also humanity’s relationship with the globe.  I think that Ben Fry’s  use of a very familiar data set to create a striking visualization represents a pinnacle of data art.

Interesting Data Set: Nand.io – ‘Identität: The Gestalt of Digital Identity’
http://www.nand.io/infosthetics/the-gestalt-of-digital-identity
‘Identität: The Gestalt of Digital Identity’ by Nand.io visualizes the digital identity of an individual in a physical format by combing online services for personal details to be used to dictate the composition of the structure.  I find the data sets interesting because they are personal, and reveal that the services that people use on the Internet have enough data about individuals to compose such complex structures.

Well-Crafted: Amanda Cox – ‘A Peek Into Netflix Queues’
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/10/nyregion/20100110-netflix-map.html?_r=0
Amanda Cox’s ‘A Peek Into Netflix Queues is a visualization of the popularity of films in different geographical regions.  While I don’t find the presentation to be particularly interesting or exciting, I want to recognize Amanda Cox’s work for consistently visualizing data in clean and thoughtful ways. I chose to this particular visualization because I think the data set is interesting.

Aside:
I have not seen any data art done with the “Megan’s Law” sex offender registries.  I think this is a really interesting data set in that there is a mixture of specificity and vagueness in the information that leads to a tremendous amount of terror.  There are images and exact locations present in the data, however the exact nature of the offense of each individual is not revealed. I have spent some time peering at photos of these sex offenders while trying to guess what their offense was.

Data Visualizations:

After looking around a bit, here is a short list of inspiration/ eye catching data visualizations that I found intriguing.

1) Beyonce Self Titled Album Drop: Data Visualization

http://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/337d9194-6458-11e3-85b5-e5e70547d141/embed_map?title=true&description=true&search=false&shareable=false&cartodb_logo=false&layer_selector=false&legends=false&scrollwheel=true&sublayer_options=

This visualization pulled Beyonce tags from twitter to fill its visualization. They tracked the world via twitter mentions of her name from hours before the release of her secret album through the day of. What I found interesting was how quickly the news of this secret album  spread like wild fire around the USA. It was like the whole East coast literally exploded for a moment. I think this layout, although simple, looks charming and elegant in its presentation.

2) Where We Feel Emotion: Visual Data

http://flowingdata.com/2014/01/02/body-maps-show-where-we-feel-emotion/

I found this data very interesting. Not only are the colors appealing and evocative of there own emotional response. The visual aid of seeing where these type of emotions take place in the body is a very interesting fact to me.

3) MTV Twitter Data: Tracking

http://content.stamen.com/kanye_west_is_an_a__hole_and_other_twitter_moments

Although this is another data tracker following Twitter feeds. The pure thing that caught my attention on this piece is the visual appeal of it. The design alone caught my attention, which caused me to follow it longer and investigate further. I want my future data tracking to be presented in a way that is interesting in the data presented, but also visually appealing for the viewer. This will be my top priority while building!

Interesting: Untranslatable Words from Other Cultures
While this might not be as much of a data visualization, I appreciate how the author used images to replace the meanings that are lost when trying to translate the terms.

Provocative: Watch Your Language
I’m not sure where this graphic originally came from, but it hasn’t left my mind for the past five months. The infrograph takes an aggressive tone in showing native English speakers how messy English really is, and finally implores us to have patience for those who struggle with it.

Well-crafted: Lose Sleep, Lose your Mind and Mental Health
The use of color and image in his visualization really drive the point home. I also appreciate the callouts, giving related information that wasn’t quite relevant enough to make it into the main infrograph, but is still important.

Another well-crafted infograph is An Infographic Is. Short, to the point, and clear.

Interesting Toolset & Project: Circos

Example from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3877785/bin/pc_114553_f2.jpg

Circos is an interesting visualization tool/graph used in computational biology for showing connections between data. Because the objects are arranged in a circle connections can be drawn between all data points. Connection weights can be determined by color or stroke width. Further data can potentially be arranged around the circle as well.

I would potentially like to use these graphs for the visualization project.

XKCD: Congress

I am a bit of a history buff so I love this chart. It presents a nice macro view that one rarely sees on historical data yet it also keeps all the micro details that make history fun. I enjoy seeing the connection between events and political power shifts. In terms of pure visualization, the use of the ribbons creates a nice sense of flow. The real enjoyment I get from this graphic is seeing how much he crammed in.

Interesting Dataset: American Heritage Time use Study

45-Year Trends in Women’s Use of Time and Household Management Energy Expenditure

For the past 50 years a study has been collecting time use journals from homemakers. This has created a rather interesting historical peek into role of the homemaker. This data has so far been used in academic settings (as with the paper referenced above) but it could be a strong baseline for comparison to present day time journals.