Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Good piece on dataviz from Harvard Business Publishing.
John Sviokla The Near Futurist RSS Feed Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization 4:11 PM Friday December 4, 2009 Tags:Information & technology, Knowledge management “A good sketch is better than a long speech…” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte The ability to visualize the implications of data is as old as humanity itself. Yet due to the vast quantities, sources, and sinks of data being pumped around our global economy at an ever increasing rate, the need for superior visualization is great and growing. To give dimension to the size of the challenge, the EMC reports that the “digital universe” added 487 exabytes — or 487 billion gigabytes — in 2008. They project that in 2012, we will add five times as much digital information as we did last year. I believe that we will naturally migrate toward superior visualizations to cope with this information ocean. Since the days of the cave paintings, graphic depiction has always been an integral part of how people think, communicate, and make sense of the world. In the modern world, new information systems are at the heart of all management processes and organizational activities. About ten years ago, I vividly remember visiting the Cabinet War Rooms in the basement of Whitehall, where Churchill had his war room during WW II. The desks were full of phones, and the walls covered with maps and information about troop levels and movements. These used color coded pieces of string to help Churchill's team easily understand what was happening: On the one hand, I was struck by how primitive their information environment was only sixty years ago. But on the other, I found it reassuring to see how similar their approach was to war fighting today. The mode, quality and speed of data capture has changed greatly from the 1940s, but the paradigm for visualization of the terrain, forces, and strategy are almost identical to those of WWII. So, the good news is that even in a world of information surplus, we can draw upon deep human habits on how to visualize information to make sense of a dynamic reality. [more]
4:11 PM Friday December 4, 2009
Tags:Information & technology, Knowledge management
“A good sketch is better than a long speech…” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
The ability to visualize the implications of data is as old as humanity itself. Yet due to the vast quantities, sources, and sinks of data being pumped around our global economy at an ever increasing rate, the need for superior visualization is great and growing. To give dimension to the size of the challenge, the EMC reports that the “digital universe” added 487 exabytes — or 487 billion gigabytes — in 2008. They project that in 2012, we will add five times as much digital information as we did last year.
I believe that we will naturally migrate toward superior visualizations to cope with this information ocean. Since the days of the cave paintings, graphic depiction has always been an integral part of how people think, communicate, and make sense of the world. In the modern world, new information systems are at the heart of all management processes and organizational activities.
About ten years ago, I vividly remember visiting the Cabinet War Rooms in the basement of Whitehall, where Churchill had his war room during WW II. The desks were full of phones, and the walls covered with maps and information about troop levels and movements. These used color coded pieces of string to help Churchill's team easily understand what was happening:
On the one hand, I was struck by how primitive their information environment was only sixty years ago. But on the other, I found it reassuring to see how similar their approach was to war fighting today. The mode, quality and speed of data capture has changed greatly from the 1940s, but the paradigm for visualization of the terrain, forces, and strategy are almost identical to those of WWII. So, the good news is that even in a world of information surplus, we can draw upon deep human habits on how to visualize information to make sense of a dynamic reality. [more]
We don't know how long this one's been around, but kudos to the gang at the WashPost for taking a concept/tool somewhat on the margin and putting it to good use for both reporters and readers. See http://projects.washingtonpost.com/potus-tracker/
Every day President Obama meets with key members of his administration, Congress, foreign dignitaries, interest groups and regular citizens. Use our interactive database to track how Obama is spending his time, what issues are getting the most attention and who is influencing the debate. Subscribe to daily schedule via RSS.
OK, OK. Using R can be a steep hill to climb for some. But here, thanks to O”Reilly Radar, is a pretty good video of a presentation on using R as a Social Network Analysis tool.
“Social Network Analysis in R — video and slides for talk on doing social network analysis with R.”
Update II: It occurred to me that it would be much better for people to be able to view the entire talk in a single video, rather than having to switch between sections; therefore, I uploaded the whole thing to Vimeo.
Tonight I will be givingOn August 6th I gave a talk at the New York City R Meetup on how to perform social network analysis in R using the igraph package. Below are the slides I will be going over covered during the talk, and all of the code examples from the presentation are available in the ZIA Code Repository in the R folder.
Below is a video of this talk, with a link to the slides I review during the presentation. If you are interested, I suggest downloading the slides and following along with videos while having the slides open, as much of what is on the screen in the video is hard to read.
Social Netowork Analysis in R from Drew Conway on Vimeo.
Andrew Little’s presentation on econometrics in R using Zelig and MatchIt are also available on YouTube starting here. I hope you enjoy the presentation, and please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Much of this is well-known by those of us who have worked with dataviz for the past decade or two, but his ending conclusions are solid and worth reviewing.
Key quote from Jeffrey Veen: “We need to create tools to help people manipulate THEIR data.”
Good examples of how to use large data sets to find and tell stories and, if desired, to answer YOUR questions about the data.
This is a 20-minute talk I gave at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. In it, I describe two trends: how we're shifting as a culture from consumers to participants, and how technology has enabled massive amounts of data to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Putting those things together has resulted in some fascinating innovations that echo data visualization work that's been happening for centuries.
I've given this talk a few times now, but this particular delivery really went well. Only having 20 minutes forced me to really stay focus, and the large audience was very engaged. I'll be giving an extended version of this talk in June at the UX London conference, with a deeper look at how we integrated design and research while I was at Google.
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/001000.html
Amy Disch, library director of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, sends along these links via the News Librarians' listserv (newslib@listserv.unc.edu). This is a gentle reminder about how the foundations of good publications today rest, first, on the integration of library AND IT skills.
Watch them in the order listed:
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.)
The number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.
The 2006 Knight-Batten Awards given by J-Lab are out. All are worth looking at, but one caught our eye, one of the “Niche News” awards in the “Notable Entries” category. Clearly, a lot of legwork on the streets of Boston went into this well-designed project. Now the only question is: Who will keep it updated and how?bostonchinatown.org Emerson College Journalism (Boston, MA)
“Quintessential visualization of civic mapping … Tell us more about these people.” -2006 Knight-Batten Advisory Board Judges
Sixteen Emerson journalism graduate students put in a combined 500 hours of original reporting to develop this web chart. The chart displays connections between more than 100 newsmakers, organization leaders and activists in Boston’s Chinatown based on who talks with whom about local news. The map also acts as a directory with personal profiles available to help people connect.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t1n20rynvsqvbk0g14g8pth0vlnbl1yd
Social scientists create maps of online interactions
Multimedia: Maps and audio charting human interactions in cyberspace
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Philadelphia
If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.
Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints in the sand….
Mapping the World : An Illustrated History of Cartography – by Ralph E. Ehrenberg Mapping the World is a collection of cartographic treasures that spans thousands of years and many cultures, from an ancient Babylonian map of the world etched on clay to the latest high-tech maps of the earth, seas and the skies above. With more than one hundred maps and other illustrations and an introduction and running commentary by Ralph E. Ehrenberg, this book tells a fascinating story of geographic discovery, scientific invention and the art and technique of mapmaking. From National Geographic, 2005. Source: Directions Magazine
Comes this interesting post on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog….
By Alexander Schellong
Social Network Theory and its principles are applied by more and more companies in a way that some of us might not be aware of yet. So what we buy, how we rate products/services, post in forums, pictures we upload or present of ourselves on the web is significantly influencing other, likeminded individuals. In return we are influenced by the network cluster we belong to for a specific habit and the like. Collaborative filtering is a key component of using social networks for different purposes. Further information can be found here. Below you will find a list of various industry and application examples:
Social Networking plattforms There are the obvious social networking online plattforms. Among them are the open business and personal contact manegement oriented like Tribe.net , openbc, friendster or the inivitation only communities like asmallworld. Either planned or already implemented users can take advantage of added services (search functionality, messaging) by paying a monthly fee 10< USD. Furthermore, there are the rather dating/partner match making plattforms like match or eharmony.
Retail/eCommerce Most of today's ecommerce sites use collaborative filtering to improve sales, cross-,up- and downselling. A prominent example are Amazon's recommendations based on various user behaviours on their website.
Music/Radio Tapping into our musical tastes Last FM, Genielab or Pandora present us with streaming music. Here the main business model lies in linking to the respective ecommerce sites like Apple's iTunes.
Books The same applies to the area of what we might want to read next which also serves ecommerce purposes.
Movies and moreMovieLens is a free service provided by GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota. Whether, you want to book a hotel, whole vacation there are numerous examples of collaborative filtering apps on websites.
Pictures The most prominent example for sharing, managing and searching for pictures is Flickr or myspace. The latter gaining revenues from online-ads.
Search engines As I have elaborated in an earlier entry on google bombs the network structure (ties) play an important role in search engine algorithms.
Knowledge Base and OpenSource The online encyclopedia Wikipedia builds on the power of decentralized, voluntary collaboration building an enourmous depository of multi-language information. Whether it was the development of Linux, Mozilla/Firefox or MySQL all rely on and consist of social networks. Further examples of openSource projects can be found at Sourceforge.
SNA Consulting As we can see the character and concepts of networks is mainly utilized for recommendations. Actual applications of SNA is done by a few companies and consultants like Rob Cross, IBM, Orgnet or Visiblepath. These companies try to uncover the informal networks within organisations to improve knowledge sharing, initiate change or bridging silos.
Finally, you can always follow latest trends in social network analysis at PNG's subpage on SNA by Ines Mergel.
