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!
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.
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.
Urbanscreen, with their installation/projection in Hamburg’s Galerie der Gegenwart have pulled of a very nice example of the technology passively supporting the content – that is, the content stays main event. The effect they produce – an impressive, building-sized, animated trompe l’oeil does what it should do: it amazes passersby with the content and the effect. “How’d they do that?” is less a question – and that’s the way it should be. Anyone can tell it’s a projector; that’s irrelevant. And it’s not even interactive.
So many interaction designers miss this key point: it’s not about the technology. It’s about the experience. The problem with a great deal of contemporary “interactive” installation work is that people become fixated on the how, not the what, which misses the point entirely. People need to be focused on your message and not on how you made it happen.
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