http://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_koblin.html
Part 1: The essential collection of visualisation resources This is the first part of a multi-part series designed to share with readers an inspiring collection of the most important, effective, useful and practical data visualisation resources. The series will cover visualisation tools, resources for sourcing and handling data, online learning tutorials, visualisation blogs, visualisation books and academic papers. Your feedback is most welcome to help capture any additions or revisions so that this collection can live up to its claim as the essential list of resources. This first part presents the data visualisation tools associated with conducting analysis, creating effective graphs and implementing business intelligence operations. Please note, I may not have personally used all tools presented but have seen sufficient evidence of their value from other sources. Also, to avoid re-inventing the wheel, descriptive text may have been reproduced from the native websites for some resources.
The hidden beauty of pollination: Louie Schwartzberg on TED Live from TED2014 Mysteries of the unseen world: Louie Schwartzberg at TED2014 Louie Schwartzberg is fascinated with exposing the world’s wonders through photography. Three years ago, his talk, “Nature. Is Data Visualization the Future of Art? “Why are we picking at these carcasses of creativity?” Holly Finn asks in a recent Wall Street Journal article, pointing her critical finger at the particular corpse of Damien Hirst’s creative corpus currently on show at the Tate Modern. “We should instead be celebrating the really new and relevant: the rise of the data visualizers.
Big Data means Advanced Data Visualization The last few years have been particularly exciting for data visualizations. We’ve witnessed a boom in the popularity of infographics and in tools to help create everyday visualizations for practical purposes. With all these exciting developments it’s difficult not to wonder what the future of this field will look like. Industry-renowned data visualization expert, Edward Tufte once said “The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?” Texas drought maps and photos Various plans for dealing with future droughts and growing demand for water in Texas exist, but most comprehensive — and accepted — is the state Water Plan. It offers a frank assessment of the current landscape, saying Texas “does not and will not have enough water to meet the needs of its people, its businesses, and its agricultural enterprises.” It predicts that “if a drought affected the entire state like it did in the 1950s,” Texas could lose around $116 billion, over a million jobs, and the growing state's population could actually shrink by 1.4 million people.
Visualize this: Is it information or is it art? By John Grimwade An old infographic chestnut. It’s always been a tricky balance between getting the story across, and making a great image. But thanks to some serious computing power, we’ve arrived at a crunch point. "Visualizing 'Big Data' in the Arts and Humanities On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 from 3:00pm to 4:30pm in 150A Thompson Library, the Humanities Institute and the Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group will host a panel discussion on "Visualizing 'Big Data' in the Arts and Humanities.” Panelists David Staley (History), Jessie Labov (Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures), and H. Lewis Ulman (English) will explore the place of data visualization as a form of humanities scholarship, with visualization as the hermeneutic act that allows humanists to read “big data.”
Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking Visualisation Last week I attended the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference and heard a talk by Robert Groves, Director of the US Census Bureau. Aside the impressiveness of the bureau’s work I was struck by how Groves conceived of visualisations as requiring either fast thinking or slow thinking. Fast thinking data visualisations offer a clear message without the need for the viewer to spend more than a few seconds exploring them. These tend to be much simpler in appearance, such as my map of the distance that London Underground trains travel during rush hour. The explicit message of this map is that surprisingly large distances are covered across the network and that the Central Line rolling stock travels furthest. It is up to the reader to work out why this may be the case.
Why Is Data Visualization So Hot? Noah Iliinsky is the co-author of Designing Data Visualizations and technical editor of, and a contributor to, Beautiful Visualization, published By O’Reilly Media. He will lead a Designing Data Visualizations Workshop at O’Reilly’s Strata conference on Tuesday, Feb. 28. Data visualization is hot. All of a sudden there are dozens of companies and products that want to help you visually analyze your data, build your own visualizations, and visually display interesting data sets of all kinds. So, why is visualization interesting? Why is it desirable?
Designing Data Visualizations Workshop: Strata 2012 - O'Reilly Conferences, February 28 - March 01, 2012 Attendees: All attendees should bring paper an pen for quick sketching. Attendees should bring their own data to work with. Alternately, they can download interesting data sets from sites such as infochimps.com, buzzdata.com, and data.gov. Taxonomy for interactive visual analysis Interactive visualization continues to grow more useful and prominent in every day analysis. Jeffrey Heer and Ben Shneiderman offer a taxonomy for the budding field . Visualization provides a powerful means of making sense of data. By mapping data attributes to visual properties such as position, size, shape, and color, visualization designers leverage perceptual skills to help users discern and interpret patterns within data.
3 Trends That Will Define The Future Of Infographics Now that everyone loves them, early adopters and forward thinkers want to know what is next for the infographic. Is this just the beginning of a visual revolution, or have they already jumped the shark? This is an important question, especially for those who are making large investments in the medium, such as publishers and marketers. Is the Infographic Dead? My cofounder, Jason Lankow, says it well when people ask about the fate of infographics in the face of increasing web saturation.
Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis Graphics Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland, College Park The increasing scale and availability of digital data provides an extraordinary resource for informing public policy, scientific discovery, business strategy, and even our personal lives. To get the most out of such data, however, users must be able to make sense of it: to pursue questions, uncover patterns of interest, and identify (and potentially correct) errors. In concert with data-management systems and statistical algorithms, analysis requires contextualized human judgments regarding the domain-specific significance of the clusters, trends, and outliers discovered in data.
45 Ways to Communicate Two Quantities Back in 2010, I was giving a workshop on interactive data visualization in Lima, Perú, discussing whether a dataset has a unique or at least an ideal way to be visualized. For a simple data structure — a list of some hundreds of numbers, for instance — around half of 20 participants were convinced that there’s one way that is clearly better in communicating the data, regardless of the unit of the values, their range, meaning, context and possible aim of the visualization. This discussion actually came out as a consequence of another idea, which resonated with most participants, as well: that there should be a guide that indicates the best way to visualize each possible dataset.