Posts Tagged ‘wordle’
I’d Paint Three of Those Murals for Some of That Data (Visualization)
I like pretty things. I like pretty things even more when they’re communicating complex information effectively. Did I mention I’m in library school?
I find myself reading more blogs on data visualization these days, and spending more time oogling pretty pictures with Tufte on my mind. I even went so far as to momentarily think about taking another course in Statistics – thankfully that madness passed quickly. I thought I’d list out some of the blogs I’m following, some tools I think are sexy, and then ask you, dear reader, to leave comments on your own fav visualization blogs/tools/rants.
(Oh – and the quick disclaimer – I know there are a lot of terms for what I am here lumping as “data visualization” – see the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. I’ve been trained to think of data as broadly writ – “alleged evidence,” not just quantitative/stacks of numbers – hence my use of the DV term. Please, do not make me get all Allen Renear on you…I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again!)
Planes or Volcano (corrected) from Information is Beautiful
Data Visualization (related) blogs and other sites:
- Cool Infographics – a blog published by a chap named Randy Krum, who is an INTJ. And a product developer/marketer.
- Flowing Data – a site by Nathan Yau, who is getting a PhD in Statistics. He recently showed an infographic about Biking in Minneapolis. MPLS, that’s the place that I like best. (See this if you’re not one of the two people to get that allusion.)
- Information Aesthetics – done by Andrew Vande Moere, a professor at the University of Sydney. His site boasts a “daily number of RSS feed subscribers” of over 23,000. Um, just like this blog. *cough* Moving on…
- Information is Beautiful – this one comes from David McCandless.
- Information Visualization Database from the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping at The New School in NYC – they also publish a (free) scholarly journal on Information Mapping.
- I mention it above, but really, the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is neat. Be sure to mouse over each element – it gives an example. The Table is part of the e-learning work done at Visual-Literacy.org, sponsored and run by a consortium of largely Swiss schools.
- Visual Complexity – from Manuel Lima, a UX designer at Nokia.
- Well Formed Data – from Moritz Stefaner…I find it interesting that his background is in cognitive science. And I happen to like the blog.
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Revisit - Moritz Stefaner's Twitter Visualization
And some tools – I’d particularly love your resources in this area, especially those not related to a single platform (i.e. Digg, Twitter, Last.fm, Delicious, et al):
- Crazy Egg heatmaps – a tool for creating heatmaps, useful for web design (and re-design). This one’s not free, but it’s pretty low-cost. If you’re sure you know how to interpret the data, it can be a powerful way to use data in design.
- Many Eyes – well-known tool, developed by IBM.
- Quintura – a sort of semi-visual search engine, that gives you tag-cloud-like visualizations on the left, traditional search results on the right. I find it clunky, frankly, but visualization-y nonetheless.
- Wordle - a way to make tag/word clouds. Perhaps a simple tool, but I like to think of it as personal visual concordance generator.
And you? Do you like data visualization too? What neat resources do you have to give me?
(P.S. Yes, I was listening to Check Your Head as I wrote this blog post; so the title is indeed the Professor Booty sample from Wild Style. I never say no to inspiration, even if that inspiration is from 1983.)
Wordling the Blog
Just wanted to see how my blog would Wordle tonight:
