“Changing Waters” looks at the meteorological and oceanic interactions within the Gulf of Maine. Using data from NOAA and GOMOSS buoys within the Gulf of Maine, as well as weather stations along the coast, I am translating data that explores the seasonal variations of marine life by looking at the interactions of atmospheric and marine data. Elements of the rich New England fishing history are also included. This large-scale installation consists of a large wall installation (33 feet wide) that plots information through the geographic anchors of a map of the Gulf of Maine, as well as a series of large, hanging structures (10 feet high) that look at more specific biological, chemical or geophysical relationships between marine ecosystems and weather patterns.

Viewshare is a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections.

The basic challenge for humanists comes from adopting visualizations that don’t suit our fundamental epistemological values. Obviously humanism is not monolithic. But methods of statistical analysis and empirical observation are grafted onto the humanities, they were not created from within the traditions of textual analysis and study. Put simply, the distinction between humanistic and empirical methods is the difference between interpretation and scientific positivism. I have no quarrel with the latter, only with the ways visualization techniques from the natural and social sciences have been adopted for use in the humanities. The result is reductive, and in most instances, produces a reification of misinformation. Exceptions exist...

Nicolas Felton’s work is a performance, nearly parodic, of the process with which I take issue... what gives his work a humanistic spin is the way it activates the reader/viewer into consideration of how one is or is not like Felton. The gap of critical thought is the space for production of interpretation as an generative, recognized, substantive part of the activity of a text or image....

Yannis Loukassis, a designer/scholar I met recently, has produced some remarkable visualizations of urban geography in a course he developed on SurfaceCities. These maps are humanistic. They are built as an expression of spatial experience, rather than assuming space as a given that can be shown on a Google map. The difference between putting humanistic information into a pre-set convention – e.g. using a standard metric timeline to show experiential or relativistic records—and using these experiential foundations to build the basic model is enormous. I could cite other examples. Stuart Dunn’s work with modelling experience in prehistoric structures in Britain, Leif Isaksen’s work on Ptolemaic mapping, Chris Johansson’s work on point of view systems within the Roman Forum—each has engaged humanistic experience in the content model of their digital projects in interesting ways.

What’s at stake is the cultural authority of the humanities. If human beings matter, in their individual and collective existence, not as data points in the management of statistical information, but as persons living actual lives, then finding ways to represent them within the digital environment is important. If the value of interpretative approaches to epistemology matters, it is because it undoes the fundamental assumptions of univocal authority, singularity of point of view, and absolute values.

Visualizing locative and time based data on distorted maps...

Maps are normally based on a trustworthy and objective selection of public data. Thus, can a map visualizing personal information be considered as public? Let’s say we limit data to very basic and factual location-time coordinates of our movement in the city. Can a map built from private data be public?

In the first version of SubMap we present three print maps which show the city from 'our point of view'. We chose our homes as epicenters of these unique, spherical, perspectival distortions.

Our first intention was to draw a subjective map of Budapest that represents our preferred places or memories in the city. To achieve this, we considered to use perspective as analogy. The same way things look larger if they are closer to us, we wanted to literally enlarge areas on the map which we feel more connected with. At the same time, locations further away or of less importance loose focus and become smaller.

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the West. In fact, most of the Third World is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn't just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You've never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling's hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling's presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster's flair.

"The website offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map in relation to a series of global issues. Users download data sets, maps and animations which can be shared across the Internet through websites, blogs and email.

SHOW® covers a wide scope of subjects based on data sets provided by the most authoritative sources in their respective fields."

Although no one app or service swept the show this year, some of the buzzworthy tools, ideas, and trends at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive were

*Big data and data visualization: Visual.ly, Splunk, Show
*Intimate social networking: Highlight, GroupMe, Wendr, GonnaBe, Banjo, Sonar
*Hacktivism: Code for America, hackathons, self-hacking
*Curation: Brain Pickings, Percolate, FeedMagnet
*Retro technology: analog tele-phonographer, Please Shoot Yourself, Motorblade
*3D printing: MakerBot, RepRat
*Journalism and publishing: Storify (read previous ProfHacker posts), The Atavist, Rhizome, Wowio

Where would you place the historical beginnings of information graphics?
I would start with early cave paintings. Seen from today's perspective, they unify visual storytelling and artistic beauty. In other words, art and science originally belonged together, and their division is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there aren't many examples of infographics remaining from the following centuries, I'd stop talking about the beginnings by the year 1350, when the French bishop Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) "invented" the bar chart. Then, in 1493, Hartmann Schedel printed his famous book Schedel'sche Weltchronik, which explained how God spent the first seven days creating the world. Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings were tools to clear up thoughts and convey knowledge in a visual manner. In 1786 William Playfair made extensive use of infographics, explaining economic matters in his Commercial and Political Atlas. Finally, in 1869 Charles Joseph Minard created an impressive diagram about Napoleon's march to Moscow and back... A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process... The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable. A translation into a vector graphic helps to look at things that would otherwise shock you. Only drawing gives you the ability to modulate details within one image. When you take a photograph you have the possibility to bring one object into the centre, but with an infographic you can show how it works internally... In perspectives the presence of the viewer is very strong, while an axonometric view has no centre point at all. We could say it's more democratic. In axonometric maps you're above the scene, not part of it, and when you don't have a vanishing point everything looks "over-parallel": everything is clear, clean and in the same light. Perhaps it's more of a communistic than democratic view of a scene. Often axonometric maps look more beautiful than reality itself... Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes. Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

So before you pick up that infographic, give it a good, hard look. Is it from a site with no real reason to be publishing it? Do some quick mental math checks make the "data" look pretty unlikely? Have the sources been made deliberately hard to check? If so, take your hand off the mouse before you post it to facebook, your blog, or your favorite email list. Remember: only you can prevent viral media from spreading.

Cytoscape is a free, open-source platform that allows you to visualize network data... Using Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet application), create one column for “Person,” one column for “Relationship,” and a third column for “Film.” You can choose the language you use to describe relationships, but be consistent... Tell Cytoscape how to interpret your data... Start making sense of your network"

[Broadbandmap.gov] collects internet connection data across the US. Funded by the FCC, the project lets viewers compare [connection type], [actual speeds versus those advertised], [availability compared to demographics], and other aspects of their broadband coverage. We designed the cartography and the interactive framework that hangs the site together... We started off with Foodspotting data; investigating where people had posted food reviews. The project took a brief detour into replacing the names of places with the names of the most popular foods in those places—so "The Mission" became "Secret Breakfast Ice," and that was fun. Not every restaurant (or even city) has reviews, though and we started angling more towards images that showed where the data was instead of what the data was. This turned into an interesting problem in its own right, and we ended up with maps of [where the buildings are, and only where the buildings are]... We developed artography designed specifically for Trip Advisors' apps for mobile devices, whose small size and high screen resolutions provide their own opportunities and challenges... Live web analytics provider [MixPanel] asked us to provide visual design direction and implementation for a new product, User Activity Streams or Streams for short... Our first [iPad app], for National Geographic; an [interactive globe] of the world draped with NGS' iconic cartography.. The CItyTracking project is in mid-swing, with http://dotspotting.org seeing active use. This year we're going to pull the pieces together that we originally [started the project with]: Walking Papers v2, Crimespotting v2 (in particular tying Dotspotting to Crimespotting), Tile Farm (which is already live in [stealth mode] and has some [new tiles available on Mike's blog]), and continuing work on Dotspotting... A data visualization for [One.org], tracking the G8 and EU's spending commitments to Africa... The [OneBayArea Travel Map] shows you approximately how far you can get from any point in the Bay Area by car, public transit, bike, or on foot, at [particular times of the day]... [Mondo Window], a site for in-flight wifi-enabled travelers, lets you look out the window of a plane and know what you're seeing on the ground... SoftCities pulls open data together with fashion design and lets people buy blankets and napkins based on Open Street Map data.

" although time in itself is an abstraction that may not be "the object of our senses, + no image can properly be made of it, yet b/c it has a relation to quantity...it admits of a natural + easy representation in our minds by the idea of a measurable space” -- a LINE. ...In addition to its visual effectiveness, the timeline amplified conceptions of historical progress that were becoming popular at the time... the timeline filled in as a kind of fantasized visual referent for an object without material substance. In its simplest form, it appeared to guarantee the simplicity + directionality of past + future history. But...history had never actually taken the form of a timeline or of any other line for that matter. + simplicity, the great advantage of the form, threatened also to be its greatest flaw” – 1945: “became relevant for the first time to tell world history in milliseconds,” “necessary to start thinking about the transmission of information over the course of the long term."

"ABOUT SOUNDAFFECTS: What would we learn if we changed the way we looked at our cities? What if, instead of just looking at them, we could listen to them?
SoundAffects was an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design. It turned everyday things, from weather and traffic to color and motion, into their own musical sounds.
EXPERIMENT: We conducted experiments throughout the week to see how disruptions on the block affected the music. Scroll through the timeline to watch and listen to the various experiments."

"The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014. 1st Iteration (2005): The Power of Maps; 2nd Iteration (2006): The Power of Reference Systems; 3rd Iteration (2007): The Power of Forecasts; 4th Iteration (2008): Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers; 5th Iteration (2009): Science Maps for Science Policy Makers; 6th Iteration (2010): Science Maps for Scholars; 7th Iteration (2011): Science Maps as Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries; 8th Iteration (2012): Science Maps for Kids; 9th Iteration (2013): Science Maps for Daily Science Forecasts; 10th Iteration (2014): Science Mapping Standards"

"There seems to be a commercial market emerging around the idea of automizing the creation of infographics. Toronto based start-up vizualize.me [vizualize.me] is currently developing an online application that can automatically translate any online LinkedIn profile into an online infographic. In particular, the new service aims to overcome the issue of reading overly long or highly complex resumes by showing the same information in a more readable and attractive way....Notably, Visual.ly is also betting on the future of semi-automized online infographics, as it is currently in the process of launching an online infographics authoring tool."

"Katie Lewis collects data through daily documentation processes, and then generates numerous systems to allow the information to exist in a material form. She abstracts and quantifies the data and creates mesmerizing pieces of art."

"An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them...Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Here we are creating communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone for instance? Using simple abstractions such as the dashed line and the kinds of visual language that we have previously proposed for RFID allow us to quickly communicate the spatial properties of wireless technologies that are often overlooked. I’ve been using these images in presentations for a while, to sensitise designers and students to the spatial and embodied properties of RFID, Bluetooth and WIFI."

"How can a life be visualized? Can a happy life be captured in numbers and diagrams?

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest prospective study of mental and physical well-being ever conducted. For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 824 individuals through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. In this book, I've taken 10 representative case studies and visualized their salient character traits, personal timeline, social supports, and physical health to draw conclusions about "the happy life.""

"I’ve found the language of networks to mirror the language of data models and that the best way to represent the categorical and relational nature of databases is through tools and visual elements commonly associated with networks....While the spatial data can reveal trends, it is like any such analysis constrained by an evidenciary layer that can call into question any claim that the trend is about more than data collection and aggregation. ...By representing the data elements of the IUCN Red List using network visualization, I can more accurately examine the data structure, its design and population."

Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts. Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed. Merge data from multiple tables. Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions."

"Infrastractures are the support system of global society. Physical infrastructures (electric networks, pipelines, reservoirs) but also information (radio broadcasting, underwater cables) transport (sea routes, aerial routes) as well as legal and financial infrastructures that rule international trade and markets, as well as the hidden but active infrastractures that control the networks of drugs distribution or illegal immigration.

If we could contemplate the superposition of all of these infrastructures we could obtain an approximate representation of how a contemporary society works. Nevertheless, as citizens, we are often only conscious of those elements we are related with. Our field of action is determined by the rules that determine how these systems operate, and their functional limits How could we be conscious of them in order to understand them better?"

"an exhibition about the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone & IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York & cities around the world. NYTE, short for New York Talk Exchange, reveals the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, by asking: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time?

globe encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York & other cities around the world. the size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the relative amount of IP traffic.

pulse of the planet illustrates the volume of international calls between New York City & 255 countries over the 24 hours in a day. areas of the world receiving & making fewer phone calls shrink while areas experiencing a greater amount of voice call activity expand."

"This project explores how data visualization techniques can be used to display the contents of library catalogues, creating a new way of searching for information.

The first part of this project uses The St Bride Library catalogue as a subject to develop a visual system that can be applied to any other library using a similar classification system. The final design displays the libraries classification hierarchy and the volume of information held on each subject within the classification system.

The screen-based outcome of this project is a prototype of an interactive tool/website that enables users to compare library catalogues and discover which libraries hold the most items on a given subject by comparing their library spot size."

""The world we live in is awash with data, that comes pooring in from everywhere around us. On its own, this data is just noise and confusion. To make sense of data, to find the meaning in it, we need a powerful branch of science: statistics!" The promising ideas behind the BBC television series "The Joy of Stats" have been posted a few weeks ago. "

"...layered and combined dozens of maps, synthesizing them into complex wholes representing the different aims and strategies of the German-controlled city councils, the Dutch Resistance, and the Allied Forces. Depictions of Amsterdam, 1940-1945, 2010, consolidates fifty original documents, including extracts from the notorious 'dot map' in which each red dot represented ten Jews (the redder the district, the more Jews living there), alongside indications of escape routes, food aid, and unexploded bombs, together with many hand-written, barely legible notes. Kocken compressed numerous position and objectives as well as time frames in these images, inciting the viewer to concentrate on small details in works that are, nevertheless, overwhelming."

"The lab uses the term Cultural Analytics to refer to its techniques for the analysis and visualization of large cultural data sets. For the "Mapping Time" exhibition, the concept is to render the "shapes" of cultural time. According to Manovich, "our goal is to demonstrate how we can visualize gradual changes over time at a number of scales - from a single minute of a video game play, to 11 years of the popular manga title Naruto, to 130 years of the journal Science (1880-2010).” The exhibition includes visualizations of novels, video game play, web comics, manga, motion graphics, feature films, and mass media publications such as Time magazine presented via large-scale prints, animations and real-time generative projections."

"By some estimates, we now create more data each year than in the entirety of prior human history. Data visualization helps us approach, interpret, and extract knowledge from this information. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen government agencies, NGOs, and companies open up their data for the public to see and use. And we’ve seen data visualization figure more prominently in design curricula, conference programs, and the media. We created Visualizing.org because we want to help connect the proliferation of public data… with a community that can help us understand this data… with the general public.... For teachers and schools: Visualizing is a place to exhibit the collective work of your students, organize assignments and class projects, and help your students find data for their own visualizations; We’re working on new tools to help you share teaching material with other teachers

"Since the first appearance of GapMinder...animation has gained substantial and increasing popularity as a way to highlight trends and patterns in complex data. Now people seem to want to show more and more fancy animations à la Gapminder in their own presentations, and an increasing number of new products have been appearing on the market that attempt to follow a similar visual style (e.g., MicroStrategy Dashboard and Report Portal)....powerful animation features have been included in many popular products (see how many animation options MS PowerPoint has?). But the question still remains: does animation really help people perceive interesting patterns?...One area where its benefits seem to be widely accepted is the use of animation to ease the interpretation of transitions when a visualization changes its configuration. Some people are more interested in animation as a way to convey complex problem solving concepts, like algorithm animation. But the results are more controversial."

"We will pay special attention to the visual presentation of spatial data, situating it in a longer history and in the theoretical complications of, and debates about representation and design. Long before GIS and GPS, there were John Snow's London cholera maps and the visualizations that made possible the imperial colonizations of the globe. In the age of high-resolution overhead imagery and Google MashUps, what other possibilities for practice have emerged? The seminar will oscillate between the theory and practice of mapping, with topics including, in no particular order, what it means to present data visually, to make visible the invisible on a map, how to lie with maps, how to do things with maps, and how architects, artists, planners and urban designers use maps."

"It is in sharp contrast to a period of enlightenment and empirical science that a re-humanization of digital activities may now take place, says Johanna Drucker. Humanistic approaches are the motif against which she frames her assertion that "interpretation" introduces an epistemological shift—which she identifies by the rubric "from data to capta"—or data that is taken rather than data which is given. Noting that visualization techniques originally developed for empirical sciences and quantitative analytics lack the sophistication needed by humanists, Drucker emphasizes that humanists must remember their core orientation and approach interpretation not strictly as visualization... She sees a serious and substantial role for the humanities "that is cultural as well as intellectual in pushing back against the dominant models of a kind of quantitative and empirical approach.""

"How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research? HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as “humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)"

Tech History - Financial - Affordances - Waste - Future

collapsing metrics - burying methodologies - obfuscating statistics - etc.

"Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, two of the most talented data visualization practitioners and researchers, were leaving IBM Visual Communication Lab to found a new data visualization venture, Flowing Media. "

"The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it."

"A screencast demo of the Series Browser - a browsable visualisation of some 65000 Series in the collection of the National Archives of Australia. This is a prototype visualisation made as part of the Visible Archive - a research project on the interactive visualisation of archival datasets, by Mitchell Whitelaw: visiblearchive.blogspot.com"

Info graphic showing the making of a book

"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data. We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways. "

Infographics from the 19th century

"...books are souvenirs of themselves. When people complain that they don’t want to read ebooks, I think a lot of this is due not to the reading experience itself—as everyone discovers eventually, the format disappears when you get stuck into a good story—but due to the other affordances the book offers. Because the life of a traditional book is not just in the reading of it. ...there’s a cognitive dissonance going on with ebooks, that they don’t fulfill those other cases, as well as the general problem of the tracelessness of electronic reading."

"@rno klein is building this searchable database of information graphics from visitor submissions and numerous repositories on the internet. It was begun as an internal resource for PIIM employees, as a purely academic endeavor (all sources are cited). Part of our research program is to classify these and other information graphics according to a taxonomy under development.

As the database has grown, we felt that it could serve as a generally useful resource. We are accepting submissions with the goal of establishing the most comprehensive, manually annotated (and taxonomically classified) information graphics database in the world."

"Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject."

"New Yorkers go about unaware of what is happening just beneath their feet: Power pulses, information flies, and steam flows. The city’s infrastructure starts just below street level, but it doesn’t stop there."

" How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research? HyperStudios Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments. (Johanna Drucker)"

"The history of rock music is a tangled web of innovation and influence, and its with this in mind that Milanese artist Alberto Antoniazzi has created the ‘Rock N’ Roll’ map, plotting the lay of the land for histories hit makers. The map, which takes its graphic inspiration from metropolitan transit mapping, presents a wide variety of bands in a clean and visually stimulating manner. Covering a range of groups from Metallica to ABBA, Antoniazza’s ‘Rock N’ Roll’ map uses great design to tackle this diversity of musical history."

The Beast: Google: "The new movie, which itself seems to be inspired by the visual zooming effects from the presentation software Prezi, defines Google as an advertising giant whose main goal is to track users and deliver targeted ads."

Data Flow 2 "is jam-packed with innovative, smart and gripping examples of the way designers, programmers and artist are giving sense and beauty to the humongous mass of data that is overflowing our 'digital age'.... Infosthetics's Andrew Vande Moere and Visualcomplexity's Manuel Lima aptly open the round of interviews. Bloggers are the ones who made the broad audience aware of the existence and wonders of data aesthetics after all. Steve Duenes, graphics director for The New York Times, talks about how the work at his department relies on a mix of journalistic research and pure design. Cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak explains why map matter so much that they can inform and influence important decisions. ART+COM's Joachim Sauter gives his view on the difference between operating information in a design context and using information for for art's sake."

Clavilux 2000 [jonasheuer.de] is a subtle music visualization installation that represents the playing of sounds by way of a simultaneous animation that can be interpreted. For every note played on the keyboard, a stripe appears of which the dimensions, position and color correspond to the way the particular key was stroke. The length and vertical position of stripe is mapped unto the velocity, while the stripe's width reflects the length of each note.

SyncLost is a multi-user installation for immersion in the history of electronic music. From a complex timeline, rhythms and sub-rhythms merge to create new sounds.

The project’s objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback. The choice is individual and leads to a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information.

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime....Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime....The text for each edition was sourced from their careful transcription of Darwin's books, and Dr. van Wyhe generously granted permission to use the text. This piece is a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions, and is intended as the first in a series looking at how the book evolved over time.

See Film --> Alex Gopher (text-based architecture), Super Furry Animals (city of thermal imaging), Royksopp (data visualization)

"it highlights the increasing theoretical and practical knowledge that is expected from interaction designers when confronted with a context that goes well beyond the safe environment of a traditional computer screen, the purely hypothetical (and almost never prototyped) building plan, or the fully controlled laboratory experiment. Here, students must deal with the complexity of a pre-existing, human-scale urban context, while also being requested to implement and evaluate their prototypes on-site. One of the main questions then poses itself as how teach a creative design subject related to the topic of urban computing, which in itself is highly complex (both technologically as well as conceptually), is often invisible and inaudible when it does exist, and barely exists at all in terms of everyday deployed products or services."

"You can use this site to look at income demographic and rents in neighborhoods all over NYC."

"...render a mobile phone more manageable and comprehensible from the moment you insert the sim card. They have come up with three new ways of understanding a new phone: The phone comes within “The Book”, a container as well
as manual, which organizes explanations around the phone itself, avoiding confusion and doing away with the feeling of being lost in a menu. “The Cards” carry interactive information, which, when tapped onto the phone screen, direct the user to the exact location in the menu and perform the given task. Written shortcuts on the back of the cards help explore and understand the use of the phone. “The Map” is a guide to new areas in the menu and avoids the maze of layers of information."

Many local governments are figuring out how to use the Internet to make government data more accessible. The goal is to spawn useful Web sites and mobile applications — and perhaps even have people think differently about their city and its government.

The Cloud physically twists and ripples in response to data patterns captured from environmental sensors placed around the grounds, data scraped from web activity, drawn from mobile carriers in real-time, interpreting audio to discern the different languages being spoken, acting as a giant scoreboard floating above the events, detects the viewing and listening figures around the games in real-time, explores the behaviour of localised weather systems, projects the global internet traffic to and from the Lea Valley, forms a gigantic smart meter for Stratford and surrounds at civic scale, and so on and so on. In this way, it takes aggregate individual patterns and reveals them at civic scale, thus binding the city’s activity together via a gentle ambient drizzle of data.

"Translation Map (world) screenshot, February 7, 2003 / Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks / http://translationmap.walkerart.org"