New Florence. New Renaissance.

Contextualizing Data

“Data visualization has nothing to do with pie charts and bar graphs. And it's only marginally related to "infographics," information design that tends to be about objectivity and clarification. Such representations simply offer another iteration of the data—restating it visually and making it easier to digest. Data visualization, on the other hand, is an interpretation, a different way to look at and think about data that often exposes complex patterns or correlations.

Data visualization is a way to make sense of the ever-increasing stream of information with which we're bombarded and provides a creative antidote to the "analysis paralysis" that can result from the burden of processing such a large volume of information. "It's not about clarifying data," says Koblin. "It's about contextualizing it." “

Photo of air traffic over N. America

BusinessWeek

Simpler Data Visualization

Instead of having to focus on how to structure code for the program, Protovis lets a user create simple building blocks, such as the colors and shapes needed for the visualization, then piece the blocks together to define the complete picture. "With Protovis, you think first and foremost in visual marks on a page," Heer says. "It is our belief that this would make visualizations easier to learn and easier to modify."

MIT Technology Review

How many words is a high-def photo gallery worth?

I am a sucker for high-def galleries like the Boston Globe's Big Picture, those of the National Geographic...and for the tech industry those that Guy Kawasaki frequently posts.

Curious what the source is for the famous quote "A picture is worth a thousand words"?

 

This site traces its history and includes an ad first printed in 1921 (click to enlarge)

"The Back of the Napkin"

As interest grows in data visualization technologies like IBM's Many Eyes, comes Dan Roam's book on visual thinking and his cool website . I hope to catch him speak at a conference in Orlando this week.

David Rumsey, Digital Cartographer

David Rumsey has collected over 150,000 maps of 18th and 19th century North and South America and has been digitizing them.

As his site describes:

"The collection on the Internet brings together the finest optical equipment and digital scanners, cutting edge viewing technology, the latest image processing software, powerful wavelet compression, and reliable long-term storage of digital images. The digitized maps are very high resolution images scanned at at least 300 pixels per inch, as measured against the original map's dimensions. The larger maps generate files frequently approaching two gigabytes in size; the average file size of images in the collection is 200 megabytes."

Microsoft Photosynth

At the recent TED Conference Microsoft Live Labs showed off Photosynth "Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features"

Here is Photosynth's view of shuttle Endeavour from vehicle assembly building to the launch pad. Thousands of photos intertwine to provide three dimensional, 360 degree perspectives.

NanoArt

"NanoArt is a new art discipline related to the micro or nanosculptures (molecular sculptures) created by artists or scientists through chemical or physical processes and visualized with powerful research tools like scanning electron or atomic force microscopes. The scientific images of these structures are captured and further processed using different artistic techniques to convert them into artworks showcased for large audiences."

Interesting art gallery by Romanian born artist and scientist Cris Orfescu

HistoryShots

Courtesy of Popular Science I found HistoryShots which "create informational graphics that tell stories about subjects, time periods and events... to inform and entertain you with intense content embedded in an elegant design."

Adding a human artist dimension to the automated art form at ManyEyes at IBM.

The technology behind Google Earth

MIT Technology Review

"These images, which are shared by Google Maps, are actually a combination of aerial photos and satellite ­imagery--and a lot of post­processing. Technology Review interviewed engineers at Google and at ­DigitalGlobe, the company that supplies Google's satellite photos, and did a little bit of reverse-engineering to figure out how it works."

Satellite Images Catch Human-Rights Violations

Backing up human-rights reports that the Burmese military is razing villages of ethnic minorities and herding people into areas under tighter military control, an analysis of satellite images shows chilling scenes of bare ground where villages once stood, new settlements near military camps, and swelling refugee camps just across the border, in Thailand. The new analysis was done by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and human-rights groups.

"What we did was essentially draw from a set of commercially available imaging satellites to see what we could see in the locations where [human-rights groups] said attacks were taking place," Lars Bromley, who heads up the AAAS's Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights project, said in a news conference. "When they got a report out of a region, we would do our best to precisely locate the coordinates where the events took place." The images were provided by two firms: GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.

MIT Technology Review