Ever since doing Stockspace project it seems I am getting asked to do data-related work. This despite the fact that my personal interests diverge from such masters of insightful infographics as Martin Wattenberg, David McCandless or Jonathan Harris.
Suffice to say that I am more concerned with exploring data structures as spaces than I am with providing new understandings of the information contained within them. Manuel Lima’s Information Visualization Manifesto calls for a seriousness on the topic of data treatments, while my projects remain comfortably frivolous.
Recently I’ve been working on a project that has required researching data sources and adapting them to illustrate a bigger idea, which has led to much Googling in the absence of good data from the client. Sometimes you find the right thing immediately, but sometimes data is hard to find in a format that is freely available and easily parsable. Since I have found some good sources I thought I’d share them here…
Miscellaneous free data
I would be interested in hearing tips about any great data sets out there, particularly interesting time series data.
Miska Knapek recently sent me a link to a source of weather sensor data from Helsinki, including measurements of wind direction at the top of Helsinki’s Olympic Tower in 5-minute intervals. He has already made some wind visualization videos and some fabricated wind data sculptures based on this data.
21:41 | April 11th, 2010 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Processing visualization head Jer Thorp is putting his money where his mouth and publishing 7 pieces of code in 7 days, free to download and experiment with. Judging from the three that he’s released so far they’re not your standard 20-minute sketches either:
- GoodMorning! is a Twitter vizualization, showing users around the world popping up on a globe as they utter the magic words “good morning”. With a little geocoding and spherical mapping thrown in, this is a sweet sketch
- NY Times: 365/360 uses the New York Times open data API to retrieve news stories for an entire year and draw connections between them. The results combine complexity with elegance for that true infoporn look.
- tree.growth revisits that old classic, the L-system tree. Thorp uses colors and abstract “leaves” to great effect.
With such a strong start, one certainly looks forward to seeing the next four sketches to come. It’s not so common to find sketches of this complexity freely available, so they’re a great study for users who are on the threshold of making more complex applications.
23:27 | October 14th, 2009 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’ve uploaded some HD videos from the Stockspace series I did a while back. You can see the whole set on my Flickr: Stockspace set. There you can also see them in proper HD resolution, which helps preserve finer details of the geometry.
These were originally created for use as TV spots for Knight Capital Group. Most of the time they get aired on financial networks very early in the morning, since traders love preparing for the opening of the market by obsessively watching news.
They were also shown on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square once, on an occasion where the Knight CEO rang the morning bell to open the NY Stock Exchange that day. As a recent immigrant to New York that certainly felt gratifying.
08:38 | September 30th, 2009 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
I’m participating in a workshop on Site Specific Architecture and Emergent Design at Snøhetta architects, Oslo. There have been presentations by myself, Søren Sørensen (AHO), Terje Johnsen (IFE), Andreas Eggertsen (Snøhetta) and Alexander Hellervik (Snøhetta).
Søren and Terje presented some interesting projects using Augmented Reality (AR) in architectural visualization. See architect.no for more information and images.
Relevant links / inspiration
17:35 | January 16th, 2007 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Websites as graphs: Code & Form HTML structure
A while back I blogged Websites as Graphs on Generator.x. It’s a nice visualization of the structure of HTML documents. Since a well-formed HTML document has a logical hierarchy of tag containers, it is possible to visualize it as a strict graph. The results are both informative and beautiful, revealing the strategies used for structuring the document’s content. It will also reveal whether the document holds up to that most essential of post-CSS web principles: A tableless design.
The original post by Sala shows some examples, and also provides a live applet that you can try out on your own site. Be sure to have a look at all the pictures tagged 'websitesasgraphs' on Flickr.
Sala has generously provided the Processing source code for the application. It requires the HTMLParser, Traer.Animation and Traer Physics libraries to run. HTMLParser is a standard Java library and hence does not come with instructions for Processing. According to the project home page, all you should need to do is download the latest version of the library, and then copy the file htmlparser.jar from the /lib folder to your sketch’s “code” folder. I haven’t tested this, so if you find otherwise let me know.
20:46 | July 8th, 2006 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Some unordered links from the workshop participant presentations:
13:01 | May 8th, 2006 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
