Pardon the expression, but there seems to be a real “surge” in
infographics and visual statistics news in recent days.  This post on Tim O'Reilly blog (an increasingly informative site, I find) points us to some
interesting tools out of the IBM shop.  Be sure to check out the site
for “Many Eyes.”  Impressive, and highly informative visualization of
useful data.

IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization

Posted: 23 Jan 2007 11:25 AM CST

By Tim O'Reilly

IBM today announced Many Eyes, a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations.
Martin Wattenberg, who developed the
original version of the treemap we use for our book market visualizations as well as the awesome
baby name voyager, and Fernanda Viegas, who worked with him on the equally awesome
history flow visualizations of Wikipedia, are the geniuses behind this project.

As with swivel, users can upload any data set, but the tools for visualizing and graphing the data are much richer. The
visualization options
include US and World maps, line graphs, stack graphs, bar charts, block
histograms, bubble diagrams, scatter plots, network diagrams, pie
charts, and treemaps. The site isn't yet live, but should be very
shortly. Meanwhile, you can get a good sense of the types of graphs
available by checking out the visualization gallery.

I asked Martin and Fernanda how they compared themselves to swivel, and Fernanda replied:

You also asked if we see our site as “Swivel for
visualization”. That phrase isn't quite accurate (any more than Swivel
is “Many Eyes for data” ;-). Both our site and Swivel are examples of a
broader phenomenon, which we call “social data analysis,” where
playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis. At the
same time the two sites fall on different ends of a spectrum. Swivel
seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds correlations
automatically. By contrast, we've placed our emphasis on the power of
human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both
approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a
powerful idea.

Martin added:

In Many Eyes our goal is to “democratize” visualization by
offering it as a simple service. We also think that there's something
special about visualizations that gets people talking, so we placed a
big emphasis in design and technology to let people have conversations
around the visualizations.

Personally, I'd love to see swivel and manyeyes working together, as
swivel already has some great data sets, but has only a limited number
of graphing tools. But that's an exercise for the future. For now, data
wonks can just rejoice that both sites exist, and should start
exploring, and as Martin says, conversing about what they find. I love
both of these sites.

Thanks to our friend at the University de Zulia in Maracaibo, Prof.
Maria-Isabel Neuman, we just learned about this Rosetta Stone of data
visualization.

This is a must-see:  “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.”
http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/documents.htm


These guys in Switzerland at the Visual-Literacy Project have pulled together, in a
wonderfully coherent fashion,  the multiple concepts that many of us
have been working on for years. 


Be sure to also take a look at the
paper by Lengler and Eppler at the bottom of the “Maps” page.
It's a good, tight explanation of what they are up to.  We like their definition:

But we're not so sure that “permanent” is crucial or should even be included.  If they are referring to “method,” then that would seem to limit the opportunity for refinements over time.  And if they are talking about the resulting displays of data, might not that reduce the possibility of dynamic data displays, say real-time traffic flows or changes in the stock market?  Simulations?  Oh, well, a refinement ripe for discussion.

Yes, we do believe in borrowing good ideas.  In this case, we are suggesting that designers of infographics “borrow” from cartographers in carefully picking colors that do more than just brighten the page.
See Cynthia Brewer's work at http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/SchHome.html

Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization
Cynthia A. Brewer

Click for generalized structure with links to
discussion of each color scheme type

The scheme guidelines are limited to the use of color to directly represent
data that occur at locations in the graphic where colors occur. The types
of thematic maps to which these guidelines apply are choropleth maps (for
example, census tracts filled with colors representing the percentage of
the population from an ethnic group), filled isoline maps (for example,
color bands that mark set ranges of terrain elevation), and qualitative
areal-extent maps (for example, different colors for different types of
vegetation). My hope is that these guidelines and the associated terminology
will also guide the work of people grappling with data visualization challenges
in diverse disciplines such as physics, medicine, psychology, and graphic
arts.

A disorderly jumble of colors produces a map that is little more than
a spatially arranged look-up table. The goal of this WWW resource is to
help you do better than that by using color with skill. This resource provides
a generalized set of color schemes and example
maps.

For those analytic journalists slipping toward geezer-dom, eWEEK magazine offers up an interesting blast from many pasts this week with “Peter Coffee's 25 Killer Apps of All Time.” 

Says he: “Microsoft's Vista has widely inspired the 'Why do I need that?'
question, which past 'killer applications' have answered in different
ways for different platforms during three decades of personal computing.”

It seems to us that comparing Vista to a break-through tool like Visicalc is a bit of a stretch, but check out Coffee's slide show anyway, just for fun.

A couple days before Christmas, Jesse Theodore — a writer at ESRI — interviewed Tom Johnson about the use of GIS in journalism.  That interview is now available as a podcast at http://www.esri.com/news/podcasts/audio/speaker/tom_johnson.mp3

No story?  Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data — and the display of data — that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature.  And often a news feature that could be localized.

Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005  illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data.  (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)

Spotlight What is the US Government Not Telling Us?

Source: SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005

The
number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number
of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.

Some researchers in the Computer Science department (nary a journalists to be found) are doing some interesting work trying to determine the degree to which people in different regions talk about different things.  The assumption is, obviously, that newspapers are a good proxy for what people are talking about.  Still, some smart people are wrestling with interesting ways to understand journalism.  Be sure to check out the published paper at http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/mehler/mypapers/heatmap.pdf

spatial analysis of news sources

21 December 2006

Friend Matt Waite, of the St. Petersburg Times, has an interesting post on his personal blog wherein he lists the 19 different software programs he used to prepare the latest installment of his ongoing work on the disappearance of wetlands in Florida.  (Who could ever imagine such a thing?)

We wonder how many journalism educators could identify these programs and what they are used for?

The online version of “Vanishing Wetlands” (Craig Pittman is the lead byline on this episode.) is rich with details and interactive features, including a fine mash-up of Google Maps to show the location of some land in so-called “mitigation banks.”  Best of all, for the analytic journalism crowd, is the explication of the story's methodology.  It's in some sort of embedded code that delivers the text in a pop-up.  Look to the upper right of the homepage for a hot button.

By the way, these guys have been working this story for three years.  Now THAT's the kind of dedication that produces insight and context.

And there's another good angle on this effort at “Working backward on the last wetlands story.”