I came across this one in a book on the Rush Library. Not that earth shattering, but something about the textual overlay caught my eye. Could be the use of text rather than colour and legend, or rather than icons to represent the use of the space. Well done.
Years ago, when my 
creative juices were sought a middle ground between a clear systematic approach and yearning to find break out of these same systems, I discovered the work of George and Iain Bain . — father and son. … While I may have toyed with the idea of putting little knots into a font (in my font design days) I don’t think I thought of taking the Bain system and assembling a font that could be used to create patterns using individual letters as the building blocks. … This is not a criticism of the tool itself (I think it is brilliant and applaud the systematic devising of pattern that went into it), merely a reflection on the nature of the process and of when the tool subtracts from the end result.
However, as I laid out the map, I was in manual mode and although aided by the visual, the growing complexity of the chart suggested that my free-form approach had really skipped the possibility that all this wonderful graph theory that I am vaguely aware of might actually have a role to play. … The resulting list in DOT looked something like this: digraph unix { node [shape=rectangle, color=orange, style=filled]; “Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI) 1974 — 1981″ ; “Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) 1974 — 1981″; “Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 1921–1972″ -> “Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) 1960s — 1971″ ; “Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 1966 -” -> “Shankhill Defense Association (SDA) 1969 -” ; “Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (1974 -)” -> “Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA)” ; “Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (1974 -)” -> “Ulster Volunteer Service Corps (UVSC)” ; } A simple start and as you can see, DOT is not too complex. … In a perfect world, this would actually be applicable to my dissertation work as well, as opposed to squirreling away a few precious hours of time I should be spending on writing about Canadian tavernkeepers ;-) Hopefully this provides a little bit of insight a to what tools are easily accessible to take relationships and represent them visually — tools which don’t demand that you learn the finer points of graph theory, but do in fact allow you leverage them to appreciate the intricacies of large social networks.
I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a wonderful assortment of story and author visualization tools available there that are both mesmerizing and thought provoking. Navel gazing is a wonderful past-time and methinks that Digg is making a concerted effort at perfecting the art. I am particularly attracted …
I have a few friends on Facebook. Last week at the Social Network/ing Conference, I was reminded that the Many Eyes application has a Facebook application that quickly grabs your social network and allows you to paste it into Many Eyes to get a quick visualization of your social network. I finally got around to …
I just happened to take a quick peek at the camera stats at Flickr today. I had uploaded and explored this data on ManyEyes a years or so ago and perhaps not surprisingly noted that Canon dominated the point-and-shoot market and that Nikon and Canon were battling for dominance in the DSLR market…all according to …
What a treat! I had had the honour of meeting and spending the last two days chatting with Fernanda Viégas from the Visual Communications Lab. Her work has been and continues to be inspirational for me personally and to the information visualisation community more substantially. She presented a tantalizing talk at the Social Network/ing conference …
Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of data liberation. His talks have seemingly inspired the UN to release public health data that …
Today I had a wonderful discussion with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes website that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launching their site, they have been hard at work bringing us new means of visualizing datasets and providing a …
Apparently, when the going gets tough, Canadians turn to lawyers. I have semi-arbitrarily qualified the two world wars as national crises (yes, we could argue over what other crises may well have faced the nation, but for sake of simple conjecture I will use these), and examined what occupations emerge amongst our elected representatives. During …