All posts from information aesthetics

You might not be aware, but it is federal election time back in Australia. And one of Australia's most successful and internationally exported TV formats, "The Chaser" (well, next to Neighbours, MasterChef, Border Security, My Restaurant Rules and Bondi Rescue, all widely available on European TV) has transformed its name into "Yes! We Can-berra". The satirical program is scheduled as a sort of warming-up act just before a popular live political discussion program Lateline.

Oh well, but what does it have to do with infographics, you say? Well, you should watch its 30-second intro clip below. If only all election statistics could be reported this way...

Thnkx Andrea!

The Proverbial Wallet [mit.edu] aims to communicate personal financial information in an ambient manner, to better inform purchasing decisions and improve one's general financial awareness. The design concept consists of electronically augmenting an everyday wallet to make it capable of providing subtle haptic and visual feedback based on the personal financial metrics of the wearer.

The "Peacock" wallet prototype appears to physically grow and shrink to reflect the user's
current account balance. Wearers will feel a subtle tightness or looseness in their pocket that persists until their account balance changes. In addition, an unusually high balance will result in a wallet large enough to be clearly visible to potential "mates". The "Mother Bear" wallet contains a resistant hinge to protect the money within it, making it difficult to open when people need to be thrifty. The "Bumblebee" wallet prototype vibrates whenever the bank processes a personal transaction, alerting people to fraud.

While the concept pictures certainly look attractive, the authors John Kestner, Daniel
Leithinger, Jaekyung Jung and Michelle Petersen have also made some working prototypes, which can be explored in their paper.

See also Making Digital Content on the Mobile Phone Physically Graspable and USB Flash Bag.

Next to its sexy visualization for-the-masses called Many Eyes, data-crazy IBM has some more serious clientèle to cater for. Its "ILOG Elixir development team" shows off the data rendering capabilities of Adobe Flex through the online demonstration World Factbook Dashboard [ibm.com]. The heavily stylized application contains various gauges, 3D column and pie charts, a radar chart, a treemap and a world map view, which are all coordinated and synced through some very smooth animated effects. The different views also allow for the dynamic, user-driven scaling of the color legend, while countries can be compared by those in their immediate neighborhood.

Exploring such very data-rich dashboards seem to provide a weird sensation I cannot put my finger on. Is it information-interaction-overload? Is it visual aesthetics? Or a mismatch in intended target audience? Why is this (personal) impression so different from, let's say, the recent World Bank Data Dashboard? I am not sure...

More information about this dashboard is available here. For those interested, there is also a similar real-time dashboard showing web statistics here.

See also:
. OECD Explorer
. The World Bank Open Data
. Gapminder Desktop
. CO2 Scorecard

The Guardian's Datablog just released an interesting run-through of how they had to deal with the raw data from the recent Afghanistan War Logs,a 6-year archive of classified military documents. The New York Times also released a short view behind the screens and the data formatting.
For anyone with an interest in datajournalism, this all makes an interesting read. For instance, with the main goal of making the data understandable and navigable for expert journalists within a tight timeframe, the Datablog explains in detail how the 92,201 rows of MS Excel data had to be ordered and categorized.

In the meantime, the first War Logs data visualizations from the Guardian have appeared:
. Newspaper-version map of IED attacks between 2006-2009
. Interactive map of all 16,000 IED attacks

Let's hope The New York Times will make the list a bit longer, making such long online enumerations as appeared here a rare exception...

One of the few data graphs I still remember well from my childhood, revealed the division of my birth country's population by age. The rising, big bulge in the middle would mean inevitable doom, so said my school teacher, as the retirement and health costs for these people (while conveniently skipping himself) would have to be paid by the slender part of the graph (pointing to us). I never looked the same to my parents since then. Now, about 20 years later, his words are still true.

The latest graph [ge.com] released by GE illustrates the aging population problem in the world by contrasting the demographic statistics of 8 different industrialized countries. Designed by Fathom Information Design, the company recently set up by viz-guru Benjamin Fry, the applet allows users to select pairs of countries, of which the data can be cycled from 1950 to 2050.

While revealing the statistical trends, the visualization still seems to come up short to describe the causal events or harsh consequences behind the phenomena present in the data, which could actually be quite intriguing. Would you agree?

In the meantime, GE is already looking for a "Data Visualization Leader", with some amazing skills in creative, technical as well as management areas.

See also:
. Visualizing the Cost of Getting Sick
. Visualizing the Major Health Issues Facing Americans Today
. On the Origin of Species

and

. Interactive Population Pyramid

The scientific study "Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood throughout the Day Inferred from Twitter" [ccs.neu.edu] illustrates the varying mood in the U.S., as inferred after analyzing over 300 million tweets that were created over the course of the day. Various density-preserving cartograms and a time-animated video were produced to capture important large-scale trends.

The researchers analyzed all public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009, and filtered those whom orginated from a US location and those that contained words included in the psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words, resulting in a collection of 300 million tweets. Through a natural language processing algorithm called Sentiment Analysis, each tweet was assigned a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. Out of the resulting data, they then calculated the average mood score of all the users living in a state hour by hour which formed the basis of a series of time-varying mood maps.

One of the interesting patterns shows how the West Coast mood follows the same pattern as the East, with a 3-hour time-zone delay, indicating that Each Coast experiences the same time-dependent swings. Weekends were observed to be happier than weekdays. The peak in the overall tweet mood score is observed on Sunday mornings, and the trough occurs on Thursday evenings.

Get the full paper here. Via Newscientist and Slashdot.

While YouTube Insight already provided detailed feedback about the performance of videos to their creators, a (seemingly) recent development has made this information now public and for all to see. Well, I could not find any other online medium reporting on this, so either this has been around since quite some time, or was not deemed newsworthy enough.

Each YouTube movie now features a detailed data visualization dashboard, which shows the number of views over time, including the exact occurrences when the movie was embedded at an external source. While competitor Vimeo has since long listed the number of views and 'likes' in bottom right corner, the YouTube version takes a more contextual approach.

In the usage statistics of great infographic movie "Growing Up", for example, one can clearly perceive the impact of different design blogs on the number of views, next to the effect on the movie's Ratings, Comments and Favorites. This feature can be revealed by simply clicking next to the arrow icon near the number of views.

In other social media statistics developments, YouTube now also features a speed dashboard, which contrasts the performance of your online connection, while popular link shortener bit.ly has recently rolled out a sophisticated analytics dashboard as well.

See also YouTube Swarm.

Following the hyperzoom style of visualization artist Chris Jordan, the movie attempts to represent the US military budget of $549 billion dollars as a heap of 88,548 Abram M1 tanks. This all fully rendered as sharp 3D computer graphics imagery (CGI) including some simulated gravitational physics.

Watch the movie below.

After the "ParSets" impact story of a few week ago, here is our second entry from last year's Discovery Exhibition, titled "Hierarchical Clustering Explorer" by Jinwook Seo.

Hierarchical Clustering Explorer (HCE) is a data visualization tool designed for biologists who are trying to understand the functions of genes. To study genes, biologists run experiments using tools called microarrays which measure gene activities under different experimental conditions. Common approaches to finding patterns in the data of these experiments is to run clustering methods but there are few tools that allow for interactive exploration of this data, which can also be quite huge in size. HCE is an example of such a tool that was designed to help in the analysis of clustered datasets.

This image shows three different clusters of genes related to muscle regeneration. These were identified using the tool and in the picture are currently selected for further exploration.

Impact
Since HCE was developed for microarray data analysis at the beginning, it is well-known to microarray researchers. There are quite a few biology journal papers that cited HCE as an analysis tool for their microarray data. The most prevalent usage pattern in this field is that users play with features of the system until they see a meaningful separation of clusters. Then they identify clusters that deserve further investigations and look at them in other views of HCE. Once they find such clusters, they often generate a hypothesis that genes in the cluster might have similar or related biological functions to focus/target genes. Using this discovery process, a team of molecular biologists at the Children's Research Institute could identify 18 genes involved in the muscle regeneration process.

Currently, there are many microarray researchers who use HCE as their primary tool for microarray data exploration and a future version has been requested. The good news is that the authors of the tool have recently received funding to develop a newer, and hopefully even better, version of HCE.

Please visit the Discovery Exhibition entry for further information on unexpected impact in teaching and meteorology that the tool has received. If are personally interested in these types of impact stories, please consider submitting to the exhibit. The deadline is now, and please check the call for participation.

This is a guest blog post by Petra Isenberg.

"Top Secret America" [washingtonpost.com] is an extensive investigative project of the Washington Post that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the September 11 attacks. More than a dozen Washington Post journalists spent 2 years developing the database, which was put together by compiling hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private-sector companies. From these records, The Washington Post identified 45 government organizations (for example, the FBI) engaged in top-secret work and determined that those 45 organizations could be broken down into 1,271 sub-units (for example, the Terrorist Screening Center of the FBI). At the private-sector level, The Post identified 1,931 companies engaged in top-secret work for the government, ranging from the "nuclear operations" by AT&T to the "cyber operations" of Abraxas.

The project also seems to put the newspaper on the data-visualization-as-journalism map, still dominated by the New York Times infographics department.

The "Top Secret Network of Government and its Contractors" explores the relationships between government organizations and the types of work being done in "Top Secret America". A radial table can be rearranged according to 3 questions: "Who does the most types of work?", "Who works with the most companies?" and "Who does which types of work?" The data can be further filtered along several categories, such as Intelligence, Military or Weapons Technology.
The "Where is Top Secret America?" shows the locations of government organizations and companies that deal with security (although stops short explicitly naming them?). One can also query for specific companies, or search the data for themselves.

Via @infobeautiful.

There are some new talks online from Hans Rosling, who became famous due to his verbal sports-commentary style when presenting the trends and predictions of world statistics during a TED talk back in 2006.

During his most recent TED@Cannes talk, held about a month ago, Hans Rosling used various physical props like IKEA storage boxes and miniature icons of living conditions to communicate the implications of the current world population growth.

Watch and enjoy the talk below.

Also see:
. Hans Rosling Gapcast
. Other talks at TED by Hans Rosling.

I do not often get to play with networks, yet I find them fascinating and full of knowledge gathering potential. The data visualization works of Moritz Stefaner, Jer Thorp, and Mark Lombardi captivate me. I am intrigued by relationships, how we perceive them, and how we can understand them.

Gephi, the "Open Graph Viz Platform", is not just for the hobbiest node nerd. It is a hardcore, professional tool for network researchers and other smarty pants. If you know the difference between Yifan Hu and Fruchterman Reingold, then you can use this tool effectively. But you do not need to be rich, as the software is completely free to download and use.

So what is Gephi capable off?

 



CRITERIA



Cost
Free and open source (they take donations)


Ease of Use
Moderate


Operating Systems
Windows, Max OSX, Linux


Export Formats
Image: SVG, PDF — Graph: CSV, GEXF, GraphML, GDF


Maturity (age of software)
unknown


Customer Service
None provided; there is community support via the forums.






Data Import Formats:



Oracle
No


SQL Server
Yes


Sybase
No


DB2
No


PostgreSQL
Yes


mySQL
Yes


Excel
No


Text
No


other
CSV, GEXF, GDF, GML, GraphML, Pajek NET, GraphViz DOT, UCINET DL, Tulip TPL, XGMML






Reviewer(s)
Kim Rees


Date reviewed
7/10/2010

Gephi interface displaying airline traffic data.

Pros
— Options! Lots and lots of options. Network layout, fonts, edge size, node size, borders, colors, labels, etc. You name it, it's probably in there.
— Grouping. Ability to group nodes by data points.
— Community-detection. Gephi can identify groups by using its modularity algorithm.
— Reduction. The ability to filter out practically anything in order to make a more coherent graph.
— Statistics! I'm sure this is really cool, but I'm not educated enough to know. If you know your Eigenvector Centrality from your Average Clustering Coefficient, then you will love this feature.
— Export. You can export your graph as SVG or PDF.

Cons
— Interface is a bit cluttered. Multiple levels of tabs and redundant buttons make it a bit confusing to navigate. This will probably wane with long term use of the tool.
— A bit buggy. The undo, cut, paste, etc. menu items never seem to work for me. Certain settings remained "on" even after I turned them "off."
— No documentation. There are a couple of user guides that are helpful, but lacking.

Main interface displaying the Diseasome data.

Review
Overall, Gephi is a useful and interesting tool. It allows you to explore, create, and analyze network graphs in a fairly easy way. It offers many visualization options for any type of network and supports up to one million nodes and edges.

There are some plugins available for Gephi that extend the functionality. I used one called GeoLayout to make the Minard graph below.

The only thing keeping Gephi from being a professional grade tool is its bugginess and lack of documentation. If its development community can sustain it, Gephi should be able to improve and become a more robust software tool.

Graph of Minard's data using Gephi and the GeoLayout plugin.

For the Purists
Gephi is a purist's delight. All the network graphing functionality is based on cold, hard science. If you recently read the Holten and van Wijk paper, you will like Gephi. It has loads of options but all within the confines of good taste.

For the Aestheticians
While there are no progressive or experimental ways of graphing networks with Gephi, you might still be happy to use it for its ease of exploration. It allows you to customize the look of your graph in many ways. It allows for proportional labels and label truncation, different types of edges based on if its directional or not, and everything from node color to group highlighting. I have to say, I was impressed by the level of visual customization. There are a few things that are overlooked, however, such as overlapping labels, annotation, and so forth. Since the graphs are SVG exportable, at least some of these visual problems can be rectified.

Two nerdy charts of network statistics that Gephi will output.

Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below! Thanks!

Kim Rees is a partner at Periscopic, a socially-conscious Information Visualization firm specializing in helping nonprofit organizations and like-minded companies convey important messages and elevate public awareness.