DoodleBuzz:Typographic News Explorer
Doodle Buzz doodlebuzz.com is an online news aggregator with a visual twist. Users are requested to submit their favorite news theme or topic, and to draw a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-place, messed-up, scribbled line on the white canvas. The line is then used as the framework to layout the headlines, summaries and related topics. The aim is to create an entirely new way of exploring information, one that allows for a kind of “quiet chaos” that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. The data is fetched from DayPI, a recent service by DayLife that allows a new architecture of online news.
Call the Shots for Radiohead
Japanese TV station WOWOW has a feature on their site that lets you mix a video of a live Radiohead performance wowow.co.jp from the Saitama Super Stadium leg of their 2008 Japanese tour. A set of quite aesthetic data visualizations accompanies this online music video mix tool.
The video interface allows you to choose from 12 colour-coded cameras to record your own “rainbow” (the song 15 Step is the opening track from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album). You can then play back your edit by clicking and dragging the playhead in the timeline, or view charts of the most popular shots (click on the two buttons on the right side, or see the screenshots below. There’s some impressive juggling going on behind the scenes to keep the video playing as you hop from camera to camera, and I am always a fan of sites that don’t worry about pixellation and opt for full screen content regardless.
Sioc.me: 3D Visualization of Semantic Space
SIOC.ME is a “real-time interactive visualization of boards.ie semantic data in three-dimensional space”. The project was originally submitted for entry to the Boards.ie SIOC Data Competition that, based on over 10 years of online discussion and around 9 million documents, invited submissions to create something which uses the data in an interesting manner.
The visualization allows a user to select a forum from boards.ie and explore it within a 3D space throughout various spatial configurations (i.e. Carousel, Linear, Stacked, Random or Grid). One can either watch a small set of demonstration movies below, or try out the application live at online.SFMOMA Artscope Visual Artwork Browsing Tool
The new SFMOMA ArtScope [sfmoma.org] has been designed for wandering, for the chance discovery of artworks visitors might not have encountered before. The visual browsing tool based on Stamen’s Modest Maps tile engine, features more than 3,500 objects from the SFMOMA collection, arranged in a continuous, map-like grid. Users can zoom in on an eye-catching image, search by keyword or artist, or just have a look around, while zoomed views of artworks can even be deep linked.
Wine Flavor Visualization
A relative simple circular visualization of the relationships between wine varieties and flavor components. The Wine Flavor Visualization [tashian.com] shows the strength of these relationships, by parsing descriptive flavor words from over 5,000 published wine tasting notes written between 1995-2000 in a major Australian wine magazine.
Obesity System Influence Diagram
Part of the Foresight Tackling Obesities project, the Obesity System Influence Diagram[shiftn.com] consists of a causal loop map that provides a systemic insight into the multiplicity of factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. The 108 drivers of obesity were compiled from 38 science reviews, and woven into a systemic diagram by the positive and negative influence arrows that ultimately link the variables into a web of causal relationships.
3D and Geographical Financial Treemaps
The use of the typically green/red colored treemaps to depict the stock market exchange is not particularly new, especially for those who know the now famous SmartMoney Map of the Market. However, FinViz.com takes the more traditional flat treemap version one step further by introducing a 2.5-dimensional perspective [finviz.com] as well as a geographical overview [finviz.com] version.
The height of the fake 3D blocks depicts the relative change in stock market price. The world map version gives a somewhat quick glance of the actual global financial state.
What People in Tokyo are Doing on a Tuesday
The Tokyo: Right Now [xoxosoma.com] website illustrates a collection of census data from Tokyo, that solves the question: "What are you doing right now?".
The main graph exists of an interactive "streamgraph", similar to the Themeriver method, taken over by Last.fm’s Stream Graph, LastGraph and the NYTimes Flow of box office movies. The graph represents different daily activities, ranging from ‘gardening’ and ‘games’, to ‘walking the dog’ and ‘management of meals’. A set of more detailed streamgraphs break this data further down between men and women, and between their economic status, such as people in school, people with jobs, and so on.
The data is based on a survey results from the Statistics Bureau of Japan, which asked participants to log their activities every 15 minutes.
Shape of Song
What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see—literally—the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.
This is Knowledge Cartography
This website aims to present the results of the ongoing research on a cartographic approach to the representation of knowledge in its present configurations.
The aim of the research is to extend the cartographic metaphor beyond visual analogy, and to expose it as a narrative model and tool to intervene in complex, heterogeneous, dynamic realities, just like those of human geography. The map, in this context, is not only a passive representation of reality but a tool for the production of meaning. The map is thus acommunication device: a mature representation artefact, aware of its own language and its own rhetoric, equipped with it its own tools, languages, techniques and supports. A model that recovers the narrative abilities of pre-scientific maps and presents itself not as a mere mimetic artefact, but as a poetic and political tool
Data Signals On A Spiral
a simple visualization metaphor that represents different numerical “signals” as colors mapped on a spiral. the signals include: the number of divisors, prime numbers, the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last 10 eyars & the temperature variation over the last 422,000 years..
Berkman Tag Content Network Visualization
a network visualization for the berkman@10 conference organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. the interface, based on bestario’s 6pli system, attempts to connect online content related by similar tags but originating from different media, including blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, flickr images & raw urls. the interface “…is a project within which the aesthetics of informatics are carried towards overthrowing the scroll/print regime in digital culture.”“the need has emerged for a space where one can judged the interconnectedness of data, and simultaneously engage the individual data elements. it is a new way of seeing information, one that situates the view of the data/media within context before providing it individually.”
