Max Kiesler – Designer

As an interaction designer I’m always wondering what’s next. Over the last few years we’ve become familiar with web application design, new constructs like recency and popularity, however, in the back-channel of web design there has been an increasing movement towards data visualizations, both large and small. You can currently see this in everything from blog design to large-scale data visualizations like We Feel Fine and digg labs. Designers and programers are coming together in new ways, which in the end result are producing some of the most functional, and creative web interfaces I’ve ever seen.

Consider this list a primer. I’ve spent the last year looking at data visualizations and have compiled a list of resources that will give you a good view of what’s going on in the field. Please use the comments section of this post to let the community know of any useful resources I’ve left out. Also, if there is enough interest in this post I’ll be happy to open up a public wiki on data and content visualization. Please let me know.

Places to see Visualizations
We Feel Fine
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Peter Mayer – Lives Connected

This is an oral history of individuals experiences during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It is also an experiment in content visualization.

Pedestrian Levitation
The creation of the work is based on the movement of pedestrians on a pedestrian crossing in public space. Some pedestrians walk only on the sidewalk and use the pedestrian crossing for crossing the street, other pedestrians freely make shortcuts on the formally imposed trafic situation. Pedestrian Levitation.net is an artwork in public space that reflects on this movement. It visualises the real movement of people, and adds a virtual movement based on the assumption that the mind of people is not subject to gravity or any other physical limitations.

Collective Subconscious
Collective Subconscious is an installation that imprints a dynamic collage of reverberating thoughts on a public space as people move through it. This project involves leaving behind traces of one’s thoughts in the space that one passes through and collaging it with other people’s thoughts. New messages will be prominently placed while older messages remain in the background and slowly fade out of existence. Words that are repeated over the day by many people will become more prominent and resonates with other instances of the words. As such the display become a visual representation of the state of being for people passing through that area.

3D Live Stats
If you’ve ever wanted to see your website usage on a large screen in a very visual way this is the application for you. From the demo video the visuals look stunning. As the earth turns you see your website visitors pop up on the globe in real-time also showing you a variety of other statistical data. One of the coolest features is the ability to hook up an interactive whiteboard or SMART board and be able to turn the earth with your fingers. Just like in the movie “Minority Report”. I do wish they would produce a web base application so my website visitors could see this information in real-time. Nice product.

Digg BigSpy
One of the first sites that got me interested in real-time data visualizations was digg spy. I had just become hooked on digg when the spy came out, and watching the stories asynchronously roll by was even more intriguing than going to the regular home page. As they say on the digg site, “Digg BigSpy places stories at the top of the screen as they are dugg. As new stories are dugg, older stories move down the list. Bigger stories have more diggs. The projects currently in Digg Labs are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. As the project matures, we’ll be releasing a public API to allow outside developers access to this data”.

Musiclens
There are many search tools for finding new music on the web. Just type in, “artist, genre or title and you’ll find some results. Ho Hum. I’ve been forced to use this same music search paradigm for years. However, there is a new breed of music sites cropping up that will give you new ways to discover new music. “Musiclens enables users to find pieces of music using very vaguely described criteria, such as loudness (perceived volume), mood or purpose. The search or recommendation query can be enhanced or limited by adjusting the ten navigation control sliders”. This site works well and has a great visualization tool.

Gapminder
The Stockholm based website Gapminder provides wonderful interactive content visualizations of important global trends. This non-profit provides information from universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organizations to graphically show us the state of what’s happing in our world. The site looks at 16 different human conditions and plots them by year and by region. Conditions include, urban population, life expectancy, military budget, and 13 other world conditions you should know. Currently, this is the most important content visualization site for consciously minded world citizens. Please visit this site to see what’s really going on in the world you life in. Giant hats off to the developers, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund and Hans Rosling!

Lovelines
Lovelines is one of the most unique content visualization ideas I’ve seen recently. “Using a data collection engine created by the artists for their recent collaboration, We Feel Fine – wefeelfine.org, Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post.” Lovelines shows it’s data in words, pictures and superlatives. Words and pictures present individual examples of love and hate. Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved and hated things. All in all a very amazing content visualization of how the blogosphere feels about love and hate on a up to the minute basis.

Software to Make Visualizations

Prefuse Visualization Toolkit
A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications.

Processing
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.

Packet Garden
Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore. To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.

Enterprise Visualizations Solutions
i2

i2 Inc. is the leading worldwide provider of visual investigative analysis software for law enforcement, intelligence, military and Fortune 500 organizations.

ClearForest
ClearForest Corporation is a provider of text-driven business intelligence solutions, supplying the analytical bridge between two previously disconnected worlds of information–unstructured text and enterprise data. Our award-winning solutions offer manufacturers, publishers, federal, chemical & financial service organizations critical links to situational context buried in text for use in Business Intelligence [BI] systems.

Visualization Tutorials
Kyle Scholz Blog
A nice group of visualizations tutorials with example code.

Interactive Visualization of Volumetric Data on Consumer PC Hardware

Interactive visualization is no longer restricted to expensive workstations and dedicated hardware thanks to the fast evolution of consumer graphics. Course participants will learn to leverage new features of graphics hardware to build applications for the interactive visualization of volumetric data. A large body of the course deals with high-quality volume rendering. Beginning with basic texture-based approaches, the algorithms are improved and expanded incrementally, covering illumination, non-polygonal isosurfaces, transfer function design, volumetric effects, and hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering. The final session of the course discusses volumetric flow visualization and aspects of system design. Course participants are provided with documented source code covering details usually omitted in publications.

Websites to Make Visualizations
Swivel
Swivel is a Web site for curious people to explore data. Swivel was founded in December 2005 by Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy. We both studied physics in college, Dmitry in Russia and Brian at the University of Michigan. We both worked together at a big software company. And we both love geeking out about data. Actually, all of us here at Swivel: Tao Ge, Visnu Pitiyanuvath, Seema Sharma, Huned Botee, and Richard Nghiem are a little nerdy about data and curious about all sorts of stuff. Data makes us go.

vuvox
As a workflow and easy to use online service, VUVOX can enable you to create personal, collaborative & emotive expressions using your own digital media – including video, photos, music and text. VUVOX reflects your life. VUVOX founders have created this foundation with your story in mind. Publish your creations to your own website, blog or MySpace page. More About VUVOX

Websites as Graphs

More visually appealing, but with less functionality, is this map by Sala Aharef’s Websites as Graphs. It helps you see the density of a network, with color-coded indications of links, images and more, but is not very navigable.

Touchgraph
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites.

Many eyes
Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

outside.in
Philosophically, this site is all about letting locals share their knowledge in ways that make sense to them, and so we’ve tried to make the tools here simple ones that will encourage many different ways of using the site.

Data Visualization Resources

Visualizing Email Content
This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture” trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration (needle mode). Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of the content parsing approach in Themail and the implications for further research on email content visualization.

Non-Flash Content Visualization
Box Grid
New models for content visualization are popping up all the time now. Box Grid was originally developed as an experimental blog site. The two things I find most fascinating about Box Grid are the fact that it was originally released in 2002, and that does not use flash. The interface is all CSS and javascript based. While this type of content visualization will not work for every project it is place where we can start to imagine new ways to surf a website. The source code is also downloadable!

Search Visualizations
Grokker

Search visualization.

Vivisimo
Search visualization.

Snap
Recently new forms of search visualization have been on the rise. Snap is a great example of a new way to view search results. The applications allows you to view an image of the page your about to visit before you go there. The site is broken into two panes one with the search results and the other with a screenshot of the page. In the screenshot pane you can choose three different sizes of screenshots. You can view the site with either a new window or in the larger left pane. As a visual person I found it to be a fun way to browse search results.

mnemo map
Most of the sites that I’ve featured recently that have to do with content visualization have really been about deep discovery. If you take that notion and apply it to a search engine you have mnemo map. With mnemo you can search Yahoo!, flickr, and YouTube by tags, synonyms and translations for any search term. mnemo, “combines the technologies of social networking, search engines and other data sources to help you formulate search queries and find really relevant information”.

Visualization Blogs, Categories and Posts

Visual Complexity
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Ben Fry
Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. For the 2006-2007 school year, Ben is teaching in Pittsburgh as the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.

Cairns
Content visualization sections in her blog

Josh Spear
Content visualization sections in his blog