Two nice little gems:

24 hours of air traffic

Titan descent data movie

HOT XXX CARTOGRAPHY PORN

hi-res

I've seen this image a number of times....and.... to be honest.... it shits me to tears.

• It's an inappropriate metaphor as Subway maps are used to plan transits not review them
• It contains ambiguous categorization such as 'sharing'
• It relies on these ambiguities to categorize particular technologies
• Scale is not used consistently or accurately
• It is not easily indexable

While it does look good it simply doesn't work as a way of displaying information. Data visualisation's primary task is to present information in a form that is intuitive and efficient. This representation is cumbersome and does little more than offer a pretty picture. I wonder how many people have actually bothered to look at the detail.

2c

Feh. It doesn't even look good. It's just one big act of cock waving/intellectual masturbation on the part of the designers: "Ooh! Let's take a really big, relatively abstract concept and try cramming it into the inappropriate metaphor of a subway map!"

Fuck, I think that's they're doing. I read the article here and I still have no clue what story they're telling.

I presume you're a fan (or at least aware of) Edward Tufte?

anyway, here is an interesting discussion on the London Tube map: link

...then there's Ben Fry who many refer to as Edward Tufte armed with a compiler. Probably old ground for you but worth mentioning just in case.

A big one of these might be usefull.

Originally posted by: Arsis Ben Fry who many refer to as Edward Tufte armed with a compiler. Nice! Thanks for that one.

The interesting thing about subway maps is that they don't need to be geographically accurate to be effective wayfinding tools. As users, we experience the journey as a linear path punctuated by stations - underground it doesn't help us to know that Kingsbury is x miles to the northwest of Elephant & Castle or that the train will take y turns to get there. All we need to know is the correct sequence of stations.

The Web Trend Map is crap for many reasons. Arse, by the way, managed to come up with a subtle analysis whereas all I could manage is "it gives me a headache". The subway metaphor doesn't work because it requires a linear progression from one point of interest to another along a single line of communication. A subway station is always a station; they are more or less interchangeable with each other, and each will always be either before or after another in a sequence... which leads to another reason the metaphor falls apart: the inherent degree of ambivalence in the Web Trend equivalent of "stations" and the relationships among them. Ebay is a user of PayPal at the same time as it is the owner....

Hang on, I get it! The lines represent categories of content! Amazon lies at the intersection of Music and Movies, so therefore it must serve up both.

Wait, though... There are also lines for Know-How and Tools. Do these indicate that one point has some sort of influence on the shape or action of another?

And what the hell is the difference between Tools and Technology?

Christ. I give up.

The Ben Fry stuff rocked. Reminded me of this from a few years ago (but much, much sexier): interactive overlays illustrating different elements of Manhattan (streets, structures, utilities, etc.) at different points in time.

// edit: I guess my eyes were better back then. I can hardly read the labels now. Full screen, baby

World map showing distribution and construction of fiber optic sea cables:

Visualizing large numbers

www.chrisjordan.com/

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22343/43692

Plastic Bottles, 2007 60x120" Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:

Originally posted by: baron ruhstoff www.chrisjordan.com/

I've always been a big fan of his work. Would love to see some of his images first hand.

he concepts and data actually hold little interest for me... what I find fascinating is the production process, least, what I imagine the production process to be. It would be fun to write tools to create pieces of this nature and scale.

Originally posted by: Arsis what I find fascinating is the production process, least, what I imagine the production process to be. It would be fun to write tools to create pieces of this nature and scale.

Ditto. It doesn't seem like he uses tessalations. (edit: it's tessellations? shit.)

On a slightly different but nevertheless related track... Dyslexia. A dyslexic friend was recently given the task of alphabetizing some folders. Apparently it wasn't a problem. I asked why, and she said that it was because she didn't have to read - all she had to do was figure out if this letter came before that one.

It reminded me of our limitations comprehending large quantities, specifically with regards to granularity and meaning.

Alphabetizing centers around evaluating individual letters. In turn, reading centers around evaluating groups of letters as single units. So where does dyslexia cause our ability to group particles into a meaningful whole break down? If it doesn't happen at the level of the individual letter, does it happen at the phoneme? Or is it when complete words bring semantics into the picture?

I'm trying to dig up an article I read recently (linked of from the cognitive science subreddit but no longer there) about how we read and comprehend. Basically they suggest that word comprehension occurs at a phoneme level, or more importantly, at the letters at the start and end of each word. Word meaning is derived from these letters in context to the previous words in the sentance. I guess from that you could theorise that some forms of dyslexia are tied in the inability to do this.

shrugs

When my sister was young she suffered from a kinesthetic coordination condition call Dyspraxia. I think Dyspraxia is generally coupled with Dyslexia... not sure... but what I found interesting (and amusing at my sisters expense) was that, in order for her to get used to the condition, she had to do a lot of reading and learning while balancing on a specially built board. They also trialled her with a bunch of different coloured glasses though non of them made a difference.

I find it amazing how the nuances of cognition can be effected by so many different things both internal and external. How the fuck do we understand anything at all?

As for using tessellations... I've had this idea for years and have yet managed to work out a way of fulfilling it computationally. I'm trying to recreate images using Cuisenaire rods. How on earth do you go about converting pixel maps into physical blocks when the blocks are restricted to having specific colours for specific lengths. Considering that blocks can be either vertical or horizontal where do you even start and how do you weigh relevance of a single block verus a combination... and in context to neighboring pixels/blocks etc. dies

Cuisenaire rods as language "The simple replacing of a rod with another of the same colour in the same position in the sentence (the sentence being represented by a row of rods in front of the teacher) is equivalent to an instruction such as 'You, Pierre-Henri, please give me another example of the structure we have just learned, but with a different verb in place of the one Marie-Chantal used.'"

Nice! As for using them to build images... that's just sick. And not in a good way.

I'm surprised it's taken me so long to come across this: www.infosthetics.com/

From the same site: 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources

Flickr app: Overview of relationships between groups "This graph depicts the interconnections between 3629 groups (7211 links, in case anyone cares). All these groups have at least 400 members, and share public content with other groups. There is an additional, esoteric cutoff leaving out groups with too little shared content, mostly to make this graph vaguely close to something one can try to interpret. I'm not sure how well it does in that respect - in my opinion, it's quite ugly..."

full size

Same body of data with two additional restrictions: > "One requiring a minimal group size (the group needs at least 400 members to be analyzed), the other quantifying the relatedness between each two groups. Quite naturally, I filtered the network graph by requiring a minimal level of similarity between groups... but that's just not a good idea. What it achieves is a depiction of redundancy.

The more redundant groups are, the higher their chance of being portrayed in the graph. More unique groups are therefore dropped out. This includes some of the best groups around, and some of you already noticed their absence from the network graph I posted." (more, including tagged graph...)

full size

more informationarchitects.jp wank

which reminds me that a good ia and designer are worth their weight in bacon.

Originally posted by: Arsis more informationarchitects.jp wank

That's craptasticular!

heh.. I did a little experiment and posted a bunch of comments to different threads on the iA site. Unsurprisingly they deleted all the comments that had negative feedback and kept all the positive ones.

The thing is that iA actually have some excellent ideas but the fact that they censor feedback and are closed to criticism is only going to enhance the already shallow understanding of ID amongst the punters.

courtesy of infosthetics: "a collection of humoristic information graphs that express popular pop songs in an infographical way"

[img]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2353/2283442220_6a1c744bdd.jpg?v=0[/img]

[img]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2043/2283442462_953465a76a.jpg?v=0[/img]

maybe this is slightly of topic, but i think this is very cool and is kind of related to information visualisation

We feel fine

lulz

[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3106/2282655473_4565b351fb.jpg?v=0[/img]

As long as we're on the subject of songs and structuring information, wasn't there a thread at WH where people were retelling songs in list format?

peoplewhohavedied.xml

// edit: What would be really interesting is an xsd.

Wired article: Frame That Spam! Data-Crunching Artists Transform the World of Information

awesome

prepares to waste invest a couple of hours

This isn't infovis per se, but it does have to do with the way people evaluate representations of information, particularly with regards to information scent: San Francisco Zoo ad campaign

nice.

Did I mention laws of simplicity? (check out the 10 laws down the RHS)

Stinky and I were fortunate enough to have lunch with Maeda just before he presented his talk on Simplicity. A really wonderful person and mind.

You MUST buy the book NOW. If you don't love it and are otherwise uninformed/uninspired by his writings then I'll pay for it.