Max Kiesler - Designer
Content Visualizations - The Next Wave of Interaction Design
SubscribeMonday, October 15, 2007
While the web is changing every day, the one constant is the need to discover information. Search, browse, lists and tags are all great ways to find what you are looking for, however, today content visualizations are giving us a whole new way to discover deep content and relational data like never before. For instance if you search for RadioHead in most of the current search engines you will find lots of links to RadioHead related information. What do you search for if you want to find bands that you might like that have the same sound as RadioHead? This is where content visualizations shine. Many give you the ability to drill down in the content you are interested in and, in a very graphical and visual way.
Below you'll find a short list of the best visualizations I've seen recently organized by category.
If you know of any other great content visualizations please email me or post it to the comments. Special thanks to all of the developers who produced these wonderful visualizations.
Create Visualizations
OpenDX
OpenDX is a uniquely powerful, full-featured software package for the visualization of scientific, engineering and analytical data: Its open system design is built on familiar standard interface environments. And its sophisticated data model provides users with great flexibility in creating visualizations.
Data Visualizations
Cabspotting
Cabspotting traces San Francisco's taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible. The Exploratorium has invited artists and researchers to use this information to reveal these Invisible Dynamics.
Crimespotting
Oakland Crimespotting is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland, and a tool for understanding crime in cities.
Digg Arc
Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs.
glTail - Realtime Logfile Visualization
View real-time data and statistics from any logfile on any server with SSH, in an intuitive and entertaining way. HTTP traffic on fudgie.org, during a Slashdotting. Each small blob is a request, and each large one is the flash movie on the front page. The numbers show requests per minute, averaged over the last 10 minutes.
MigMap
MigMap conveys a picture of how and where the production of knowledge is currently taking place in the area of migration - and of who is participating in and has access to it. MigMap investigates precisely how the new forms of supranational governance that can be observed in the European migration regime function. It looks, for example, at how European standards in politics and civil society are implemented, and at the authorities, persons and institutions taking part in this process. It examines how the various key players in the public and private spheres are interrelated and funded, as well as at the ways in which these spheres overlap or differ in terms of focus, location or personnel. Finally, it analyses how responsibilities are allocated and legitimised - and explores the theories, data and discourses upon which current paradigms in migration are based.
TreeMap
Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.
Trulia Hindsight
Trulia Hindsight is an animated map of homes in the United States from Trulia. The animations use the year the properties were built to show the growth of streets, neighborhoods and cities over time.
Universe
Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.
Visual Thesaurus
The Visual Thesaurus is a dictionary and thesaurus with an intuitive interface that encourages exploration and learning. Available in both a Desktop Edition and an Online Editione.
Media Visualizations
Bungee View
Bungee View lets you search, browse, and data-mine image collections. It shows an overview of the entire collection, in addition to the familiar result list and item details of other search interfaces.
EarthAlbum
Earth Album is a google maps mash-up with youtube and flickr. The service allows you to dynamically explore videos and photos from both websites on a map.
FlickrVision
FlickrVision is a flickr Google Maps mash-up. It's a great discovery tool and you can spend hours just watching the images open around the globle.
TiltViewer
TiltViewer allows you to browse Flickr's most interesting images in a 3D space. It's designed to provide a fun, intuitive user experience. Images are pulled from Flickr's Interestingness list. TiltViewer also has the option to display any set of Flickr images based on User Id, Group Id, Set Id, tags etc. To do this, append a query string on the end of the tiltviewer url.
Music Visualization
TuneGlue
TuneGlue is music relationship visualization. The application lets you type in an artist and TuneGlue will return all of the artists it can find related to your search. By clicking on the artist button, and then release, the app will show all of the releases by this artist.
Search Visualizations
TouchGraph Google Browser
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites. Use this free Java application to explore the connections between realted website.
Tag Visualization
You Say We Say
This project is a visual experiment in tagging. On the left you get the personal tags for the personal bookmarks ordered by frequency, and the containing box per is log-scaled so you get an impression of the long-tail position of a tag. Which means that often used tags are large, bright and go to the top. On the right are the community tags for the tagged resources. In the middle the tags with the same name are connected. If a line is horizontal, the indvidual and the community essentially agree on the relevance of the tag for the ressources. The steeper it is the larger the disagreement. If no line starts at a tag, it means it is not present in the other list. Very fascinating construct for tagging.
Comments on this post
bertrand on 10/25 at 01:33 PM
Huge work..
I love it.
take also a look at this company: http://www.inxight.com
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Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco
focused on next generation websites. About Max...
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