Nicole's HAR130 Tumblog
Information Visualization: in this class we will attempt to actually define what this is.
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The State of the State Taxes
What do you think of this visualization? I read it in Time Magazine this past week. To me this seemed like a good visualization. The colors help determine whether the there is high or low tax rate. I think if you were looking for a place to live where taxes in different areas are low you can definitely find it in this visualization.
(Source: TIME)
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The Creators: An Interactive Installation
While not so much an information based visualization,The Creatorsused Processing to create an interactive visualization. It allows you to have a multi-touch table that visualizes a novel. As by the midterm project, I love visualizations that relate to any sort of literature or words. It allows for a person to be a part of the installation.
The video of this is really interesting. Although, I am not quite sure what is going on in their video, but does make for a crazy interpretation.
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Network Confusion
So I don’t know about you but for me network visualizations are rather confusing. Hive Plots is a program that makes an easier way to create them as well as a more visually complex plot. Hive Plot is better for those with large networks and it correctly places nodes so they are not overlapping or making weird what Hive Plots calls “hairballs”.
This is some set of hive plots but below is the network structure.
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Google+ Ripples
So I’m not quite sure if the G+ thing has really taken off but they have this really interesting application or add-on to G+ that allows you to see the way posts are spread through G+. Here’s an example of what I am talking about:
This shows how a post by Mike Shaw (I have no clue who this guy is) can spread quickly through his Google+ friends or circles (whatever you call it). It is interesting to note how this web diagram connects people. It creates a network of people so you can see how far the post has spread. You can see how many times people have shared a certain post. Ripples is still in its beginning stages but it is sure to be even more awesome by the time they have finished with it.
Check out this video from the official Google Blog.
(Source: plus.google.com)
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ImagePlot: A Different Type of Scatter plot
So for this week’s assignment, my group and I found this awesome plug-in for a program. It is called ImagePlot. It plots images according to certain specifications. We have formatted it to plot the licenses plates of states to show the minimum wages in states. Obviously not every state has a different minimum wage so plotting each one so you can see the license plate is sort of difficult.
I’m not posting our work just yet because I want to put it back into Processing to make it more than just an image. The processing part will make it interactive: hovering over things and text appearing and all that jazz. But here is an example of what ImagePlot is capable of doing:
This seems really small so I suggest clicking here to see a bigger version where you can actually see each individual Time Magazine cover. I also like that you can put a customized scale on it without having to figure out the pixel location like you do in Processing. If I can use this program I’d love to get all the pictures or images from the MoMA website and organize them by vibrancy or saturation. Some of the other examples from this program are of artworks and their brightness and saturation (see below).
Obviously unless there is a scale on it you can’t really tell what it is trying to describe. But they do make for great visualizations!
(Source: lab.softwarestudies.com)
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GeocodEarth.com
This visualization is cool because it is very interactive. I think it is for more of an international level than the US. It can render posts live to flickr that deal with a certain category. You can move the globe to see who is posting what. Each person has a cute little icon person who jumps when that person posts. The location is based on their location they posted. The site takes a little while to load sometimes but when it does it is really neat.
I picked mine to watch people from twitter and certain words from flickr. I am assuming that in order to get this data there would have to be a program that is constantly watching what we are doing. That aspect of this is slightly creepy. But anyway this is just a new take on the twitter mapping. And it has a more interesting quality of flickr mapping. I’ve always wondered what a person could do with that data. I think you could probably do one with Facebook photos as well. But it would only work if you actually geotagged the photos.
(Source: geocodearth.com)
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This Week’s Assignment:
Flights are always an interesting visualization. This one that my group and I made for this week reflects the direct flights to cities from JFK airport in New York. The thickness of the line determines the higher number of flights. So there are lots of flights from JFK to LAX. If I could alter this one slightly it would be to make the lines a curve instead of strait lines. That would be more visually appealing and make more sense because that’s how flights generally go. I would also want to make it so we didn’t have to figure out the cities by manually entering each point for the lines. That would have made life so much easier.
