Max Kiesler – Designer

Climate change scientists have started a fightback against sceptics who argue that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate can largely be explained by natural variability. This comes after the email hacking furore.

A major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies tracking the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system finds that it is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change.

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“A simple visualization of IRC communication behavior: Who is talking to whom? Or, more appropriately: Who is namedropping whom?
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“My final year project in information design. Two big (200cm x 90cm, 80 x 36 inch) posters show the variety and attitudes of members from an internet community like MySpace.

On the first poster you can see the functions used, as well as additional information such as age, educational background, family status, gender and how often they are logged in. So, all demographic data which are available from every member’s profile.

The second poster gives you an overview of the geographic position, based on a map. You can see where the members are distributed. The aim was to give the management the opportunity to know much more about the members than would have been possible with a simple scan of their database only”.

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“The looks del.icio.us project is my first attempt to combine graphics design with programming. The concept is to see how users develop and sustain their tagging methodologies on del.icio.us.

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“VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range”.
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Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The music was segmented in single chanals. The chanals are shown fanlike and the lines move from the center away with the time. The angle of the line changes according to the frequency of the channel, while the frequency reaching a high level, the chanal becomes highlighted by orange.
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“Here & There is a project by S&W exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They’re intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.”

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“For a long time now I have been a great admirer of Matthew Hurst’s work and I’m continuously impressed by the works posted at visualcomplexity.com. So I decided it was time for me to try something like this myself.

What I did is write a program that is able to log in to a very popular German Social Networking website and grab some data from it. I grabbed the friends of my profile (only 2) their friends (about 100) and the friends of their friends (about 5000). I used PHP with cURL for that and saved the data to a MySQL database.

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At its core, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed to support teaching, learning and research and for anyone who needs to organize, contextualize, and access digital information. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, faculty and students can map relationships between concepts, ideas and digital content.

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History Flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia.

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Twitter Spectrum is an application that is built with Processing and shows the conjunction of two words on Twitter. As Jeff states, “I’ve slightly improved the Twitter Spectrum application so that clicking on words used in conjunction with both terms properly use OR in the query. I also changed the default search terms to ‘from:jasoncalacanis’ and ‘from:scobleizer’ to show how you can compare the tweets from two users rather than related to two terms.”

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“Wordle is a toy for generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

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“The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source project. There is a lot of books, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive Linux kernel map gives you top-down view to the kernel. You could see most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions and calls. Each function on the map is hypertext link to source code. The map is interactive. You can zoom in and drag around to see details.”

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“LastGraph is a web-based service that aims to give you a new way to explore your last.fm listening history. We use the last.fm API to transfer across your basic profile data, and then crunch it around in various interesting (and often hilariously inefficient) ways.The site is written and run by Andrew Godwin, with a large amount of rendering power generously donated by State51.”

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This is a fairly long list of visualizations produced by Chris Harrison. Chris is a doctoral student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The data sets span a wide range of sources including, digg, colors amazon, wikipedia and trends. If you have some time on your hands check out these great visualizations. They all have complete descriptions and screenshots. Thanks Chris!

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“Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection. The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 1890 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (for rectangular matrix, an augmented matrix is formed first) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm.”

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Today is a visualization application that resides directly on your cell phone. It shows a variety of activities including incoming calls, outgoing calls both answered, and unanswered. It also shows incoming and outgoing sms messages. The application takes this data and creates a visual map of the day on your phone. While this may not be the first cell phone inherent visualization – it’s the first one I’ve seen. I would love to see this for more phone platforms. Currently, it’s only available for Symbian based mobile phones. If you’re lucky enough to have one – the sign up, and application download are free.

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TEDsphere is a project created by Bestiario. All of the information and videos came from the TED Talks: Inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers. TEDspace offfers a different way to enjoy this amazing knowledge highlighting the relations between talks content.

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One can find it on almost all products: the bar code. Everyone knows that the bar code is used to facilitate the cashing and recording of goods in stores. But which information is actually encoded within the bar code? A simple answer to this question can be found at one of the product databases on the Internet, which are basically huge networks of national code databases. Keying in the 8, 12 or 13 digit figures of a bar code into an international code database, returns information on the manufacturer and the country of origin of the product. Moreover, each bar code is assigned to only one product worldwide; but these individual details are hardly visible to the naked eye.

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A nice visualization by Akshay Java of network analysis of Twitter. “The following is a graph constructed using contacts from about 25K users. Notice that there is a link connecting two users if either one has the other as a friend and hence it is an undirected graph (of about 250K edges).

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