Visuale

I'm surprised to see how the number of animated visualizations is growing day by day and how effective they can be. Here is a small and simple one from Google Labs.

The animation shows how "the distribution of requests to google.com around the world changed through the day on August 14, 2003." The day in which North America experienced a blackout because of massive power outage (the Italy 2003 blackout was even worse).

Interestingly, the image comes form a paper published by people in Google Labs which has nothing special to do with visualization. The paper describes a new language that permits to automate the analysis of data coming from parallel machines and to aggregate the results in one single file. Here is the reference:

Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall Rob Pike, Sean Dorward, Robert Griesemer, Sean Quinlan.

Anyway, I think there definetly is a trend towards animated visualizations, even if the community seems not to be really aware of it or interested. I cannot recall any special paper or presentation form Infovis conferences or papers from similar venues. We'll see.

[via communication nation]

Today I returned to this post found at infosthetics about the visual theme developed this year for Poetry on the Road, an international literature festival which is held every year in Bremen, Germany.

At first, I was really impressed by the beautifulness of this image but I couldn't easily get the meaning of it all (which is already a bad sign when looking at a new visualization). Now I've spent some more time on it and I am less and less convinced of its design.

I try to summarize how it is made:

1. Each word appearing in a poem is encoded with a number. Assigning "a numerical value to every letter of the alphabet. Adding the values of all letters, one gets a number that represents the overall word. (For example, the number 99 would represent the word "poetry".)"

2. Each poem is arranged around one ring in a way that the diameter is proportional to the poem's lenght. "So you can see the short poems in the centre of the poster, while the longer ones form the outer circles."

3. Each number is depicted by a red ring, whose thickness is based on the number of words corresponding to the number "(poetry shares the 99 with words like thought and letters)"

4. Each word of the poem (the red ring) is connected to another by grey lines, following the the sequence of the text. "So solid lines represent repetitive patterns in the poem."
   

I cannot get any interesting trend or inspiring emerging pattern from it. Such kind of visualizations are nice when you can exclaim: "Ah ah! Here is something in the text I couldn't really get without a visualization!". Here the only visible trend I can get is the darkest lines, which are supposed to represent repetitive patterns in the poem; a quite standard pattern in pieces of literatures like these.

As often happens, interaction is almost completely neglected. It would be nice to have a way to highlight the repetitive patterns, so that they can be readily explored. Or even select one word and see which repetitive patterns it generates with other words. And also, given that short poems are in the center, where resolution is low, it is not clear if the darkest lines are a product of extreme overlap or because there are many repetitive sequences.

Finally, it is not clear why a whole circumference is used when only half of it is used to lay out the small red rings. The reason why it is so, I guess, is that the words are connected by "splines" which are used to avoid crossing the center of the circumference, but that at the same time cannot make a whole circle.

The whole thing reminds me of TextArc, probably the most famous visualization of such kind. But it is incredible how much much more informative and cleverly designed (and still beautiful, inspiring, and artistic) it is compared to this one.

Creating beutiful images to impress people is relatively easy, while making visualizations to explore, enable profound insights, and see the invisible, is extremely harder and requires a lot more devotion than this.

I've just found this web page with links to almost all infovis 2006 papers.

It's nice that so many authors publish their papers online before they become officially available in the common repositories (e.g., ACM digital library).

And it's also nice there's people like Hong Zhou, spending her own time collecting and making them available online for the rest of us. Thank you!

Here is yet another animated visualization (I'm getting addicted! :-))

It depicts FedEx's planes' paths in one day in the US. They all depart from and return to Memphis International Airport, the central hub, even for packages whose destination is closer, following the typical "hub and spoke" logistics strategy (it derives its name from the shape of a bicycle wheel).

More info on "hub and spoke" from Wikipedia:

In the early days of FedEx, customers would be surprised to learn that all packages went through the Memphis hub, even packages between relatively close cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. While it seems inefficient at first, in reality the aircraft leaving San Francisco would have packages for many destinations, and likewise the aircraft heading for Los Angeles would have packages from many sources.

The system was pioneered by FedEx and soon proved to be far superior than any other methods. In fact, all the other major companies like UPS adopted the same soon.

The animation is really nice and well crafted. I also think the background music is very appropriate, it feels like if it was telling a story.

[via infosthetics]

The World History Timeline it's a beautifully crafted time wall chart compressing major historical events and human acheivements in thousands of years, on a 195 cmx134 cm or 78"x53" frame.

In the author's words:

It took more than four years to work out this timeline in a coherent and enlightening manner. The structure of this timeline is set up to facilitate interdisciplinary understanding of diverse intellectual, artistic and scientific movements, discoveries, and cultural developments. The history of the sciences, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion and political milestones, have been mapped in a coherent and synchronoptic manner.

The map has an interesting structure: a large part of it (about 80% of its width, on the left side) is devoted to events spanning a time period between 3000 BC and 2000, covering literature, religions, art, evolution, etc. On the remaining space, on the right side, there are modern items like economics, sociology, biology, etc. Here is a picture making its structure clear.

I think this is a very powerful example of how vital and useful visualization can be. I like the idea of visualization as a discipline not necessarily related to computer screens. I can imagine the impact of a chart like this in a classroom to let boys and girls understand history at a glance and stimulate their curiosity. Also, this is yet another example of how one of the primary purposes of visualization is the illustration of complex information in a way that understanding becomes easy.

In fact, it's strange how much relevance is given to the role of discovery in visualization over understanding (or as I prefer saying "making sense of data"). Sure, the discovery of previously unknown information is valuable and exciting but it is extremely rare and, in any case, understanding is always a prerequisite of it.

By the way, if you are interested the wall chart can be preordered from here. I think I'm going to buy one!

[thanx to Bruno, via pasta&vinegar. ]