The Next Era of Designers Will Use Data as Their Medium The software industry today is in need of a new kind of designer: one proficient in the meaning, form, movement, and transformation of data. I believe this Data Designer will turn out to be the most important new creative role of the next five years. When I began my career 25 years ago, the notion of design in the software industry was still nascent. Mark Rolston About Mark Rolston is the cofounder and chief creative officer of argodesign. Over the years, the role of the designer has improved as demand for this talent increased. That leads to where we are now: the inflection point where data emerges as a critical new medium for design. But that is changing—and here’s why. Data has become a rich medium. New systems are using rich data, and big data. The new design challenge is to use this data for the same humanistic outcomes that we have in mind when we shape products through the user interface or physical form. Files. Data. Information. Knowledge. The Rise of the Data Artist Data modeling.
Data Visualization vs. Data Analytics The term Business Intelligence solution can be a deceiving one. Many software solutions that call themselves BI can actually only offer you half of what you need. Here it’s important to make the distinction between two types of business analysis and intelligence tools: end-to-end solutions and ones that are merely front-end. An end-to-end solution is made up of a platform back-end, basically the tools and algorithms that handles preparing all the data, and a front-end that creates data visualizations and dashboard reporting. While we like to see our data in easy to handle visualizations, platforms that only give you this are not enough to get real insights from your company’s data. When it comes to enterprise needs, the difference between these two types of software, are strikingly clear. Get to Know the Back Story For the purpose of effective analysis is that you first need to have all your data in one central place so that you have a single version of the truth to work from.
Data-driven Insights on the California Drought (12/8/2014 8:33:13 AM) A newly released interactive California Drought visualization website aims to provide the public with atlas-like, state-wide coverage of the drought and a timeline of its impacts on water resources. The U.S. Geological Survey developed the interactive website as part of the federal government's Open Water Data Initiative. The drought visualization page features high-tech graphics that illustrate the effect of drought on regional reservoir storage from 2011-2014. For the visualization, drought data are integrated through space and time with maps and plots of reservoir storage. Reservoir levels can be seen to respond to seasonal drivers in each year. California has been experiencing one of its most severe drought in over a century, and 2013 was the driest calendar year in the state's 119-year recorded history. White House open data policies continue to provide opportunities for innovation at the nexus between water resource management and information technology.
Molecular clouds show off potential, beauty of data visualization | Scientia “Simulated molecular clouds are beautiful, intricate, and ever-changing — properties that make them ideal candidates for high-powered visualization,” wrote Erica Kaminski, a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, when she submitted these winning images to the data visualization contest sponsored by the Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation (HSCCI). The contest helped showcase the capabilities of the new VISTA Collaboratory in Carlson Library — and in this case the Center for Integrated Research Computing’s Blue Gene/Q system, called Blue Streak, which consists of 1,024 nodes,16 TB of RAM, and 400 TB of storage. A molecular cloud (or stellar nursery if star formation is occurring within it) is a type of interstellar cloud whose density and size permit the formation of molecules, most commonly molecular hydrogen — in contrast to other interstellar areas that contain predominantly ionized gas.
Visualized 2014 Roundup | PolicyViz Videos from the 2014 Visualized conference in New York City were posted late last week. Shortly after the conference last January, I wrote 8 separate posts summarizing my observations about data, storytelling, aesthetics, and other aspects of data visualization and presentation. In case you missed those posts, I’ve compiled them together below. Visualized Part 1: Summary A little over a week ago, I attended the Visualized conference in New York City. You’ll also notice that I will make more than one mention about the quality of the presentations. I don’t think I can summarize the two days at Visualized in one sentence, so here are three: The term “data storytelling” is varied and complex (and perhaps already overused).There is no single, best strategy to get people to connect with large, and sometimes abstract, numbers.Data are not beautiful; data are hard and messy. The easiest place to start is at the beginning where Sha Hwang kicked things off. Visualized Part 3: Excel at Excel
APEXvj TURBO: Supercharged Music Visualization Remember WinAMP? Or Milkdrop? People are still using and loving these programs, but APEXvj TURBO brings the concept of music visualization to the present day, utilizing modern technology and a dedicated approach to automating aesthetically pleasing visuals for music. These days we mostly see these types of visuals at large festivals or concerts. They usually take months or even years to complete and the budgets for them are huge. The goal for this Kickstarter is 200 000 NOK (Approximately $29 000), which insures that we have enough funding for the following awesome features: APEXvj TURBO is planned for release on OS X and Windows in June 2015. At 230 000 NOK (Approximately $33 500): Publish to YouTube feature - easily add visualization to your own music for publishing to YouTube. What you see in the Kickstarter video is already completed (in fact, you can try it yourself - just point your Chrome browser to apexvj.com right now!) Here are the milestones we have decided on:
Franco Moretti: L'objet des humanités numériques, entre perspectives micro et macro Le problème de la visualisation de données Macroanalysis, par Matthew Jockers La couverture de Macroanalysis de Matthew Jockers illustre bien la problématique du “très petit” et du “très grand” : on y voit un réseau de personnages de roman. On ne peut toutefois pas y distinguer les noeuds, trop petits, et difficilement les arêtes tellement elles sont nombreuses. Ces images posent problème : elles nous font naviguer entre le très petit (l’unité du graphique, le point) et le très grand (l’image globale) sans intermédiaire qui fait le lien entre ces deux dimensions. Du “petit” au “grand”, ou l’inverse ? Il y a deux façons d’étudier des objets littéraires par le biais de telles abstractions visuelles : 1. A Quantitative Literary Historyof 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels Le grand, dans un nuage de points, c’est l’accumulation d’une multitude de petites unités, leur somme. 2. Style at the Scale of the Sentence C’est le cas lorsqu’on fait une analyse de fréquence de mots dans un texte. 1.
9 Multimedia Resources for Information Design Whether you’re a web designer or specialize in graphics, information design is one of the fundamental principles of usability and visual storytelling. A good grasp of information architecture enables you to create web designs, infographics and other data with a user-friendly presentation. If you want to learn how to design user-friendly websites, create interactive infographics, redesign your navigation, visualize a dataset or simply brush up on visual communications and information architecture, the resources below can help you become a more effective designer. OnDemand Webcast: How to Make an Infographic: Data, Design, Distribute We’re thrilled to announce that John T. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s an infographic worth? In this 1-hour webinar, John walks you through the three essential phases of creating a top-notch infographic: data, design and distribute. Data Flow 2 edited by R. Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. with Brian Miller
Yellowstone's Thermal Springs -- Their Colors Unveiled Printer friendly version Share 19 December 2014 American Institute of Physics (AIP) WASHINGTON D.C., December 19, 2014 – Researchers at Montana State University and Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany have created a simple mathematical model based on optical measurements that explains the stunning colors of Yellowstone National Park’s hot springs and can visually recreate how they appeared years ago, before decades of tourists contaminated the pools with make-a-wish coins and other detritus. The model, and stunning pictures of the springs, appear today in the journal Applied Optics, which is published by The Optical Society (OSA). If Yellowstone National Park is a geothermal wonderland, Grand Prismatic Spring and its neighbors are the ebullient envoys, steaming in front of the camera and gracing the Internet with their ethereal beauty. “When we started the study, it was clear we were just doing it for fun," Vollmer said.
The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2014 It's always tough to pick my favorite visualization projects. I mean, it's a challenge to pick and rank your favorite anything really. So much depends on what you feel like at the time, and there's a lot of good work out there. Nevertheless, I gave it a go. These are my favorites for the year, roughly in order of favorite on down and based on use of data, design, and being useful. One unintentional theme: All of my picks are interactive or animated or both. The Upshot Last year, Nate Silver took his ball to play elsewhere, so the New York Times had a data-centric hole to fill, and they came out better for it with the Upshot. If I didn't cluster the Upshot visualization projects into this one section, the individual works would dominate the list. Where We Came From and Where We Went No doubt feeding off the popularity of the dialect quiz map from the end of 2013, the state-by-state migration charts were also fun and playful. The Most Detailed Maps You'll See From the Midterm Elections
Your Wild Life – A Whole New Way of Doing Citizen Science, Maybe Some parts of science are boring. Some are tedious. Some seem as though they will never end. It is these parts of science we tend to try to enlist the public in helping with. You can, of course, listen for birds as part of the Breeding Bird Survey, count butterflies as part of the 4th of July butterfly counts, or set out cookie crumbs to collect urban ants for our School of Ants project. A challenge is that so many of the exciting moments in science come not from single observations but instead from context (That isn’t the only challenge, but one thing at a time). And so it is with incredible joy that we have embarked on a recent collaboration with Holly Bik and her team of programmers, artists and futurist gurus. Let me back up to explain the kind of data I am talking about. Phinch, we hope, will provide a partial answer to “what then?” So how do you do it? Right now, there is no user guide or recommended path for exploration.
Your Wild Life Releases Home Microbiome Data Set for Visualization | microBEnet: the microbiology of the Built Environment network. Nice article on the Your Wild Life blog: Your Wild Life – A Whole New Way of Doing Citizen Science, Maybe. It discusses a collaobration between Your Wild Life and Holly Bik on visuliazation data from the citizen science – microbiome work that has been a part of the Your Wild Life project. The collaboration has involved getting data into a format that will work with Phinch a data viz and exploration tool at Holly Bik has been working on. They write: So how do you do it? First, we recommend you watch a video tutorial that Holly Bik prepared to walk you through how to use Phinch. Data visualization is a critical component of research in many ways these days.
The 18 Best Infographics Of 2014 You could sift through piles of dense data sets in an attempt to understand the trends and discoveries that emerged in history, psychology, current events, and even fictional dragons in 2014. Or you could look at these infographics, which visualize otherwise overwhelming data as beautiful charts, graphs, and maps. Co.Design's Infographic of the Day series regularly showcases the best in data visualization, and this past year saw many stellar examples of the power of the well-designed visualization to illuminate information about nearly any subject, from the serious (the daily activities of Congress) to the frivolous (a visual compendium of the world's best dogs). We couldn't resist promoting Co.Design's own in-house data visualizations: the Great Wheel of Food Mashups and a map of each U.S. state's weirdest eating patterns (we're a bit food-fixated, apparently). Here, our favorite infographics from the past year. The Sleep Schedules Of 27 Of History's Greatest Minds Cats.