The Evolution of the Web. Pretty pictures: Can images stop data overload? 16 April 2012Last updated at 19:01 ET By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News Brain scan: Research suggests that one way to avoid being overloaded by data is by presenting it visually rather than text or numbers Sitting at your desk in the middle of the day, yet another email notification pops up in the corner of the screen, covering the figures you're trying to digest in the complicated spreadsheet in front of you. Your laptop is open on the desk next to you with another set of figures you need - meanwhile you're frantically tabbing through different documents on the main screen.
You have a meeting in 20 minutes and you suddenly feel as if you're swimming in a sea of impenetrable data, and you're starting to sink. Welcome to the 21st Century workplace, and "data overload". Under siege You're not alone. Dr Lynda Shaw is a neuroscience and psychology lecturer at Brunel University in the west of London. "When we feel overwhelmed we start to delay making decisions. " “Start Quote. d3.js. Data and Visualization: Predictions for 2011. A lot of my time these days goes into planning DataMarket‘s efforts in the new year. An essential part of that is trying to grasp the major trends in areas that matter to us. DataMarket is building an active marketplace for statistics and structured data. We believe in a “visual data exploration” approach, meaning that users’ first experience with any data is a visualization that should provide a quick overview of what the data is all about, then allowing users to dig deeper to see the raw numbers, download the data in various formats, embed it in other web content or connect to the data live using our API.
This vision, and our goals for the coming year – including our launch of an international data offering – frame the topics that I’ve been thinking about. For links to broader predictions in the fields of Big Data and Data-as-a-Service see the bottom of this post. That said, here are the things I believe will shape our key areas of interest in 2011: Data Markets Chart solutions VC activity. Research: Lev Manovich Coins the Term 'Media Visualization' New media theorist Lev Manovich just released a new text, titled What is Visualization?
[manovich.net]. One might first wonder if such a question is not too... obvious, but in the light of the contentious discussion about the tension between artistic and scientific representations of data, and whether data art should be called visualization at all, it is always worth covering the basics. The text is quite substantial, so you might want to wait for some quiet time to dive into it. The main arguments in the text focus around distinguishing information visualization, scientific visualization and information design. In addition, Lev proposes a new term, "media visualization", for those visual representations that do not reduce data into topology and geometry, but instead uses techniques to reorganize data into a new visual representation that preserves its original form. In addition, Lev Manovich describes 3 visualization projects developed in his lab: ImagePlot, VisualSense and HiperView.
Information aesthetics - Information Visualization & Visual Communication. Emerging Information Architectures « Srinivas Reddy’s Weblog. Having just read the book on “Beautiful Data” I would like to share some of my insights/learning’s from it. The book provides examples of elegant data solutions from different domains (including space, music, medical research, web apps, government data,..).
A common pattern across domains is the need for smart handling of large data sets in the different stages of information processing (be it for data collection, storage, processing, visualization or collaboration around data). While ‘beauty’ (be it in data, code, art, person..) lies in the eye of the beholder, there can be some common metrics for it. When we deal with web scale data ‘discoverability’ of information is key. While ‘web search’ provides a lot of value today what we really need is to enable ‘data find data’. A transparent way to work with structured and unstructured/semi-structured data is a problem being worked on for some time now. Trends in enabling data portability in real time need notice. Like this: Like Loading... Information Is Beautiful | Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized!
David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization. Decode Exhibition Points Way to Data-Driven Art | Underwire | Wi. The cryptic works on display at London’s Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition manipulate raw data as a kind of virtual pigment, finding form and fun amid the sensory overload that threatens to overwhelm the 21st-century hive mind. Several exhibition pieces showcased at Victoria and Albert Museum depend on human presence to produce their full effect. A motion-detecting eyeball, for examples, blinks each time a visitor blinks. In another piece, a video screen enables visitors to “paint” smears of color through the power of their gyrations.
Other installations, on display through April 11, strip-mine data streams from Twitter, translate a day’s worth of flight routes into animated abstract art and hurl text-message fragments onto dozens of tiny display screens. “Decode is about demystifying the black art or magic of digital while showing that this work can be poetic, emotional and poignant,” show co-curator Shane R.J. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth. 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009 | FlowingD. It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode. Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale.
State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day. At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's exciting times for data, indeed. Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here. With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Honorable Mention: MTV VMA Tweet Tracker The MTV VMA Tweet Tracker, a glorified bubble chart from Stamen Design and Radian6, showed the buzz on Twitter over the MTV VMAs. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.
Network of data visualization references. Developer Santiago Ortiz explores visualization references through Delicious tags and puts them in a discovery context. There are two views. The first is a network with tags and resources as nodes. At first it looks like a giant hairball, but mouseover and you get a fisheye effect to zoom in on nodes, which makes them more readable. Mouse over a tag, and the labels for related resources get bigger, and likewise, mouse over a resource, and the related tags get bigger. The second view lets you compare resources. In the network, select two ore more resources, and then click on the bottom button to compare the selected. The rings represent tags and are placed by popularity for each resource, so a ring on the outside is a more frequently used tag than the smaller ones in the middle. MindMapping: Mind Maps, PDF Management and Reference Management. Are you using mind mapping tools such as MindManager, FreeMind or XMind?
And reference management tools such as JabRef, Endnote, or Zotero? And do you sometimes even create bookmark in PDFs? Then you should have a look at SciPlore MindMapping. SciPlore MindMapping is the first mind mapping tool focusing on researchers’ needs by integrating mind mapping with reference and pdf management. Adding Reference Keys Manually This feature allows assigning a reference key to a mind map’s node. SciPlore MindMapping is based on FreeMind (0.9 RC7 Max) and 100% compatible to FreeMind.
When you install SciPlore MindMapping you will be asked if you want to allow (anonymous) usage statistics. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen | Video on TE. Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty. Michael Deal ◊ Graphic Design. Datavisualization. Mind-bending music visualizations. Mentionmap - A Twitter Visualization. The Future of Lifestreaming | Futurelab – An international marke.