we were lucky enough to have the fantastic David McCandless come in to the agency yesterday to talk about the wonders of data visualisation (what this space). if you haven’t already – check out informationisbeautiful

I’m not sure if the following meets David’s rules for what makes a great data vis but it’s a quite nice interactive data visualisation of 5 years of data visualisation:

Cool data visualistion of global traffic to the New York Times website on the day Michael Jackson died.

The internet, social media and geo-spatial mapping tools have been brought together to bring data on the nonprofit sector in California to life.  Non profit Mapping are using these tools in an interesting way to create useful knowledge on the nonprofits in the Bay area. They are trying to understand why the number of nonprofits are decreasing in the area but also aim to help funders, donors and philanthropists maximize their resources. This type of nonprofit mapping can prove useful in understanding the civil society sector in other regions of the world and merits exploring.

Loving this…

Think Tiger might have more than 1 problem relating to women now if the stories are to be believed…

The X factor coverage from the News of the World as a wordle:

The X factor coverage from The Sun as a wordle:

The person who won the public vote each night as a wordle:

Explanation of this madness:

I’m becoming more and more interested all the ways which statistics, data and news can be presented or analysed online. I’m also interested in the X factor.

Hence, this wordle based experiment, which shows that it wasn’t The Sun and the NOTW what won it for Joe. It’s interesting to see how Joe’s name does not dominate the media coverage of the X factor, the other finalists and some of the more popular or controversial contestants also come up frequently.

I’ve also, clearly, got a bit of free time at the moment….

…even when the data is made up!

I posted a couple of weeks back some videos which make fantastic use of text on screen.

Well here’s another. Watch it, and you’ll learn about the power and possibilities of infographics…and a little bit about life itself:

Hattip: ISO50

Some years ago, my friend Justin showed me a copy of Visual Thesaurus. I squealed with delight, which is always embarrassing at work. Click on the image below to see why.  (All the images in this post link to the examples, by the way).

Visual Thesaurus

Recently I came across an open source version of the technology underlying Visual Thesaurus at spicynodes.org.

What am I talking about?  Well, this is a way to present information so that people can explore it in a naturalistic way by clicking from concept to concept in an interactive ‘map’.  But seductive though it is, it’s  not always the best way to present information.

The Good

This approach is helpful when you want to hide the options you reject.  This can be with a rich and complex subject (the Visual Thesaurus) or a simple tree structure, as with the catalogue below.   It may not be the best choice for a catalogue but in this case I think it works.

This catalogue works well

It helps if the subject matter is well understood: this example covers the solar system and seems to have been abandoned, which is a shame.  If you click Sun > Mars > Phobos you realise what a neat explanation of the solar system this could be.

Providing information on a familiar subject

The technology also lends itself to certain forms of artistic endeavour, I like this one in particular:

A poetic journey

It’s also been used with reasonable success to  deliver Haiku

I think the technology lends itself to this sort of artistically guided happenstance, and I can certainly imagine an artistic installation along these lines.

The Bad

I looked at well over a hundred of these maps, and those the best. The worst are dreadful.

Do not use this technique if your users are likely to want to step backwards and forwards through the navigation.  This is how people navigate when they want to be sure they”ve not missed anything.  SpicyNodes own home page shows how exasperating this approach can be.

Spicy Nodes own home page

Don’t use it when a simpler tool would do.  Whoever created the example below was on top of their data, but their information would be much better presented in the form of bulleted slides. Using the interactive map just makes it unnecessarily fussy:

A bulleted list would be better

Here we see how important it is to get the hierarchical structure right. The map below is an A-Z of the world’s nations. But wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have them organised by geographical region? If you want an A-Z list, then I think a simple A-Z list would be better and would take up less space.

A-Z But is this the best use of the space?

And this is the worst scenario of all: a navigation tool for a web-site.  It actually subtracts value, because it takes up the whole page and makes it hard to view the content of the site in a logical sequence. It’s a relief to know the organisation concerned has a traditional side and top navigation structure.

Site Navigation - high on gimmick and short on benefit

Finally, I wasn’t sure how to categorise this map (which I found fascinating, by the way).  It would make a good teaching aid but it’s not particularly good for conveying information.

Teaching Aid

So where does that leave us?

Firstly it’s clever but not necessarily helpful. In fact mapping something this way is only useful when people know what they want to find out and want to ignore everything else: if they need an even view of the whole subject matter then this is not the tool to use.

Secondly it’s good for a certain type of artistic expression; it wouldn’t surprise me to see something like this in a gallery.

And finally, creating this sort of map is time-consuming and you really have to understand your data well, and so do your users.

I struggled to think of a situation where this would be the best tool for presenting data so I decided to go the artistic route, and see if it added anything to the experience of the sort of poem with repeated lines.

Dylan Thomas's Villanelle - Do not go gentle into that good night

I have to conclude that it doesn’t, but it was fun trying.

This page, BenFry.com has examples as well as Data that you can plug in to your own processing code.
It accompanies (is created by the author) O’reilly’s “Data Visualisation” book which is great if you are interested in learning how to actually write the code for you data visualizations.

Social and economic information is becoming increasingly easy for the public to access and understand and Google seems to be leading the way in this regard. Google is utilising data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries on 17 World Development Indicators through the use of the World Bank’s public API. Have a look at the World Bank Data Visualiser and find out more about what they have been up to! Google has already acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyser software in 2007, which is being used to provide a deeper understanding of development through data visualization. Organizations like the OECD have been using it to bring statistics to life (for example with Factbook Explorer) and the IMF is using such technology to inform the public about the world economic outlook.  However, CSO information also has tremendous potential for helping us better understand socioeconomic progress and it can also be used to help CSOs understand their internal structure for improved efficiency.  Believe it or not, this concept of information visualization in the nonprofit sector is not new.  As far back as 1971, the Union of International Associations (UIA), an international nonprofit based in Belgium, produced a 16mm film, which illustrated the work they did in the field of information visualisation  (worth fast forwarding 4 minutes ahead to see how the data is being visualised – unfortunately there is no dialogue only music!). Today, with modern and easily accessible ICT resources at hand, civil society organisations can now better analyse information about themselves to improve the way they work and serve the public better.

I have become a little bit obsessed of late with data visualisation – the art of taking, often interesting, yet dry figures and turning them into pretty pictures. Sites such as Information is Beautiful  - have hundreds of visualisations if you are looking for an example.

I wish more Media planners would take note and start using this style of representation in their presentations. So much of a planners job seems to be selling, and simple visualisations of insights, may allow a client to be more engaged – and therefore more receptive to our work.

Anyway, check out the video below. It demonstrates the rise and fall of various Eurpoean Empires. Its pretty, and very interesting.

Everything I Have by Simon Evans

This is old-school data visualisation. A visual catalog of your earthly possessions.

CSO information has tremendous potential for helping us all to better understanding socioeconomic progress, but can also help CSOs to better understand their internal structure, to improve efficiency.  As far back as 1971, the Union of International Associations (UIA), an international nonprofit based in Belgium, produced a 16mm film, which illustrated the work they did in the field of information visualisation  (worth fast forwarding 4 minutes ahead to see how the data is being visualised – unfortunately there is no dialogue only music!).  Today, with modern and easily accessible ICT resources at hand, civil society organisations can now better analyse information available about themselves to improve the way they work and better serve the public.

Social and economic information is becoming increasingly easy for the public to access and now Google is utilising public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries on 17 World Development Indicators through the use of the World Bank’s public API. Have a look at the World Bank Data Visualiser and find out more about what they have been up to!

Diagrams, I never used to like them much in school. Maybe it’s due to lack of y chromosome, because my overall spatal sense is not very good anyway. Plus the fact that the data they gave us to mull over mostly was just not very interesting. I won’t even get started on what most of the stuff looked like.
It can be done differently though. It is possible to hunt down interesting facts and figures on current political topics and convert those into creative, original and most importatly beautiful diagrams. Like David McCandless in his online project Information is Beautiful. He publishes visuals that are packed with hard facts about the world we live in and they just look damn good. As stuff like this can come in handy any time obviously, it got made into a book: The Visual Miscellaneum (available i.e. at Amazon).

Mountains out of Molehills (Foto: David McCandless)

What you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask:
How safe is this HPV-vaccine then? How dangerous is swine flu really? How many troops were sent to Afghanistan by whom exactly? And how many billions are you actually spending for what (via fefe)?
Ok, I have to admit I still don’t get a hundred percent of most of this stuff and yes, maybe it’s just me and I can’t blame it on the missing y chromosome, but my motivation to try and wrap my head around this kind of stuff has increased a lot.

Information is Beautiful | David McCandless | Twitter

German

Governments collect huge quantities of data, but rarely display it in ways that are both useful and engaging. The Australian government is addressing this by creating “Gov Hack” events, where designers and developers go to work for a day and a half to find ways to present the data online. It’s part of the Government 2.0 Taskforce which aims to increase open access to data.

LobbyClue; Visualising the relationship of various lobby and supply groups.

The winners of the last event found a way to present the inter-relationship between lobbyists and a government department using something similar to an aquabrowser, called LobbyClue. Their stated goal was to “correlate data about Government contracts, business details and politician responsibilities to show the relationships between these items’

The the function makes it fun to explore, but I’m not sure what possibility of analysis are possible, it seems to require mousing over the entity’s name to get the details of the deal or relationship.

My favourite was “know where you live“, it’s perhaps less ambitious in terms of what is done with the data, but the clean presentation and the ease of use appeal. I can imagine this being a useful tool for home buyers. I wish there was something similar for my current city, perhaps I should send them an email.

my old neighbourhood

One of the highlights of #media140 was learning from the diverse examples of the way journalists from all over the world are using Twitter and other forms of social media and user generated content. It was particularly enlightening to hear from Al Jazeera’s social media director Riyaad Minty (@riy) whose presentation shared the way his network is using innovative tools to track hotspots like Gaza. As well as their comprehensive site gathering news on Gaza, they have a user generated site which tracks incidents of violence in the region, a dedicated Gaza Titter feed, and a creative commons repository for all of their Gaza footage.

One of the interesting points he made is that their decision to share all their Gaza footage with a creative commons license led to an impressive range of uses but also had important commercial rewards for the organisation leading to greater traffic and the development of ongoing commercial relationships. Uses of this material have included:

• films
• school projects
• billboards
• community servce annoucnements
• videogames
• music videos
• teaching

Al Jazeera's Tracking Gaza site collects user generated report incidents of violence from the region

The New York Times have been leaders in the use of innovative data visualisations and data mapping graphics. These range from data mapping the spread of sub prime mortagages through to their reader interactive word chart that tracks how readers are feeling about President Obama one year on.

One year ago, we asked NYTimes.com readers for a single word to describe their mood about the presidential election. The response was overwhelming (73,400 words) and varied widely, with “hopeful” and “anxious” as the top choices.

Now, a year after the election of Barack Obama, we want to know: Has your mood changed? Are you energized, hopeful, disappointed, ambivalent or outraged? As Jeff Zeleny wrote Tuesday, Mr. Obama has now seen his pledge to transform the country give way to some of the hardened realities of office. While it will be years before it is possible to gauge the success of his governing agenda, his record for some of the issues on which he campaigned is beginning to come into focus.

Twistori is another example of visualising the stream of consciousness from the Twitter stream created by @amyhoy and @thomasfuchs. You can view a stream of tweets that mention love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish. You can also download a Mac desktop screen saver.

While Twistori is beautifully presented and captures the diverse collective consciousness of Twitter – from the sublime to the banal – as ReadWriteWeb points out other visualisation tools have also started to collect some interesting data from similar experiments:

Twistori, according to the site, is the “first step in an ongoing social experiment.” The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via Summize) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. In then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.

It’s not clear from the site what the second step in the experiment is, but Hoy and Fuchs say that the project was inspired by We Feel Fine, which aggregates feelings from a large number of blogs and social sites. We Feel Fine created a number of explorable data visualizations based on the feelings it gathered, and used it to draw some interesting broad conclusions.

There are a range of great tools available that track Twitter and present the data in interesting visual ways. Brian Piana (follow him for great data visualisation links) has created a range of exciting art projects using Twitter. One that is endlessly fascinatingt is his Journal of the Collective Me which collects references to “me” from throughout the Twitterverse.

Piana explains its evolution

After launching When Did THIS Happen a few weeks back, I saved a Twitter search for “when did this happen” to see the piece had any legs. (It did not.) But I became fascinated seeing how the phrase was being used and by whom. It gave me a glimpse into this really diverse international community, where preteens, parents, grandparents, college students, working professionals, etc., all have a voice. And these individual voices can be sarcastic, inspirational, desperate, threatening, and even hateful. This project looks to unify all of these disparate voices into one.

Journal of the Collective Me (www.thecollectiveme.com) parses through the Twitterverse, presenting tweets containing the word “me” in real time. Other phrases and words have been filtered out to reduce spam and disguise the source. Content itself is not edited, so the incoming tweets range from happy to funny to sad to serious to obscene. Clicking on the current entry will produce the next, and so forth. Regarding aesthetic, Journal of the Collective Me was
inspired by the simple stylings of yet another Internet meme, Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, which rose to fame during the election.

Very special thanks go to Donovan Buck, who bought into the concept and provided the wonderful scripting that makes it work.

The screen shots below show the funny, disturbing and poignant mix:

Dipity is great free data visualisation tool (thanks to Riyaad Minty for this tip) that allows users to collect and present data from any site on the web. You can then present it as a timeline, a map, a list or a fipbook. Dipity then allows you to embed the collection in your website. The example below shows someone tracking the development of the swine flue story.

For a fun Dipity check out the one on internet memes

Dipity tracking Swine Flu story presented as a timeline

Dipity tracking the Swine Flu story presented as a flipbook

Dipity tracking Swine Flu story presented as a Map

Over at TED, there’s a short yet highly interesting look at data visualisation technology called the AlloSphere.

I’m a big fan of data visualisation – I think there’s currently too much emphasis on data search. As the amount of storage we continue to consume grows though, data search will only get you so far. To use an analogy, how helpful is a search so refined that it allows you to find a needle in a haystack if you have 500,000 haystacks in front of you?

We are already at the cusp of search being insufficient. Personal storage is a perfect example of this. On my desktop machine I currently have approximately 10TB of formatted storage presented, with about 70% utilisation. Yes, I’m not the average user, but I may be slightly representative of where the average user will be in about 3 years (I’m not unique – I think this would be the case for a lot of people in either IT or multimedia industries).

As much as Apple’s Spotlight is fantastic, sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes it’s not about knowing what you’re searching for, but drilling down what you’re searching for. For example, I use a fantastic little app on the Mac called Grand Perspective to be able to visualise storage layout/use either on entire drives or individual trees of folders. I don’t use this all the time – and not always for search, but sometimes it’s more useful than any search tool I can think of – e.g., when I need to quickly see what is using space in a folder structure, or when I’m looking for a particularly large file I was working with recently but can’t recall what it was. Here’s a screen shot of Grand Perspective run against my home directory:

Grand Perspective

As you can see, it’s big chunks of colour all over the place. What information does it give me? It lets me quickly see where space is occupied. Spotlight doesn’t do this; Finder doesn’t do this – nor do the counterpart features of Windows. I can just move the mouse cursor over any block and instantly see what file it maps to – instantly giving me comparative size details.

Data visualisation: get used to the term – I predict you’ll be hearing it with increasing regularity in the coming years.

(Bringing this back to NetWorker (or even EMC, more generically), I’d love to think there’s serious R&D being done on working out how to integrate data visualisation techniques in their products. In NetWorker we’ve sort of started to get the most primitive versions of this in the dynamic reports in NMC, but that should be seen as only the most absolute starting point. The next phase is to have the developers talk to experts in the field so they get an appreciation of how they might represent data in a way that allows faster “deep diving”.)

It was our friend Olive’s 1st birthday at the weekend and the celebrations included a party in Garforth and accommodation at Paul and Sarah’s lovely house. (That makes it sound a bit like Paul and Sarah are Olive’s parents. They’re not though; that’s Tom and Gemma.)

So, after the playbarn and Garforth’s charity shops, we returned with Paul and Sarah to their home and were joined by Tom, Gemma and Olive for a most enjoyable evening. 

The next day I took the opportunity to catalogue Paul and Sarah’s collection of Davies originals.

Our Leeds flat was around the back of a large old house and the landlord used the grounds to store a continually-replenished supply of skips filled with rented-accomodation debris. At first we thought this was a bad thing, but then we realised that it was a good thing. We got a lot of good stuff from those skips, I can tell you. A lot of wood, a lot of furniture, a lot of everything. I only wish Freecycle existed then because some fantastic things went to waste.

After a bit we got rats, which aren’t so cool. It was worth it though.

Pretty self-explanatory.

This one took quite a long time to draft out. It shows the interrelation between the guests at one of Deb’s barbecues a few years back. Who met who where.