The Stanford Visualization Group have been responsible for a number of fantastic tools for supporting information visualisation work. One of the inherent problems in creating data visualisations is that you usually do not get the data in a format that is particularly easy to work with. Cleaning up the data is one of the first things that you must to, so that you can take out extraneous data points, pare down to what you want to actually work with, and then format the information logically, so that it will be easy to incorporate into your visualisation software or code.
This step, data cleaning, is usually a real hassle and Excel is not very good for the task, because it’s not really made to do this sort of thing. Although you can delimit by commas, tabs or arbitrary characters, it’s a pain to write regular expressions that allow you to take out things or re-order them. You can write scripts to do this, but then you’re busy writing scripts instead of creating a visualization.
That’s why I’m very excited about Wrangler, a new tool for data wrangling that substantially reduces the pain associated with this process.
Check out their video and head on over to try it for yourself!
At the Art.on.Wires Festival in May I talked about three recent projects: spacehoppers, my visualization of the Londons bicycle hire system, and NetChimes. I discussed some of the technical details about how these projects were realised and reflected upon the process of building those interactions. I aso demoed the NetChimes audio feed with participants in the audience tuning in, during the talk. Art.on.Wires had a really good feel this year, very cozy, with lots of people learning, hacking, chatting and making things happen. There were several live performances involving collaboration with off-site musicians and dancers, with live feeds streaming in from around the world. My friend Jason Geistweidt had a preview of work he has been doing in the process of creating the World Opera, involving dancers from southern California and dancers in Oslo interacting via life-size video projections and audio. Nice stuff.
Video of my talk is below, but note the title is “Connecting the Physical and the Digital” and not “Of Bits and Bikes” which I presented in London at sameAs.
I’ve been collecting a good deal of data about the Barclays cycle hire bikes using a great little API, which has taken a lot of the pain out of screen scraping the Boris Bikes website. I’ve got several Mb of data now and have got to where I can start to do plots over time. Mapping coloured circles to the number of bikes available has given me a nice little visualisation of the distribution of bikes over the course of the day. I’ll be talking about the project at sameAs on 28 March. And of course, I’ll be continuing work on the ambient display.
It turns out that some of the people over at CASA-UCL, my alma mater, have also been working on this problem (there’s nothing new under the sun!), using historical data obtained from the cycle hire scheme – as recently demoed at Dokbot London.
99% of the time pie charts suck (see my rant). However, there is a situation where it can be useful: when you are trying to convey a general idea of part-to-whole relationships among 3-5 entities which are meaningful parts of a whole unit. There’s an excellent breakdown of how this works, why it works, and dos and don’ts here.
This image has to be the best use of a pie chart I’ve ever seen.
I’ve been working on the physical side of my ambient display for a Barclay’s Cycle Scheme docking station on Theobald’s road – one that I use pretty often. The challenge for this display is that it uses a motor and drive assembly harvested from an obsolete HP printer. Properly, anything requiring precise positioning should use a stepper motor, but that’s not what I found inside the printer. It uses a simple cheapie induction motor. So, I’m considering it a design challenge/constraint.
There was a plastic optical calibration strip somewhere in the assembly but that’s long gone. So precise positioning will be rudimentary, as the vagaries of induction drive do not always yield reliable results. My tradeoff for the display is to zero-out the motor for every display cycle instead of skipping directly from one number to the next. Each number will have its own drive time and the motor supply is regulated to keep it as constant as possible to minimise the likelihood that the motor will be slower or faster depending on supply voltage.
This test is just to make sure the drive times for digits and the serial communication are all working properly. Next steps are connecting it to the web API and making it look pretty!
Presentation graphics packages like PowerPoint have always been slightly irritating to me. Although they can make it easy to present ideas, this doesn’t mean that the presentation will be meaningful to an audience. Information design heavyweight Edward Tufte has offered scathing critiques of presentation software and argues that they lead to a different kind of thinking for both present and audience.
This funny poster on BoingBoing (thanks Cory) encapsulates this love-hate relationship and pokes fun at Tufte as well. I’m still chuckling…
The clever coders over at the Simile Project (MIT) have released a new tool called “Exhibit” for visualizing and enabling dynamic interaction with data. And it’s easier to use! Like their Timeline widget, which I used to time plot the references in my dissertation, you only need basic HTML skills and some data to look at and it is relatively easy to code something up. Simple examples and the required files to roll-your-own data visualziations are provided on their Simile Widgets website. Nice.
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