Datavisualisation

This week marked the last lecture of networked media production. I would have to say that the nmp lectures were by far the best and most interesting out of all my units. I want to thank Michael Honey for delivering such interesting lectures.

This week we learnt about Datavisualisation. I think the greatest thing about datavis is using methods such as color, movement, size, etc it can make raw data that is usually hard to read and compare, easy to read and compare.  (insert awesome analogy for explaining datavis here!)

For our next assignment, one of the choices we have is to make our own datavis. I’ve been thinking about what data i want to use. The two ideas i have come up with is using the raw data that is stored on my phone (call and text data) and doing something with it, like finding what days of the week i am using my phone.  The other idea I have which I am more leaning towards is using raw data from a sport and using that data to attempt to find out stuff, like if there really is a correlation between age and how much a team wins.

I have come up with a few ideas but I am still very up in the air on how i am actually going to ‘visualize the data’. This will be my next challenge.

One of my favourite old school datavisualisations is John Snows visualisation of the Cholera outbreak in London 1854.  By creating the datavisualisation  below John Snow was able to locate where the main source of the outbreak was coming from, which was from a pump on Broad Street.

Other Datavisualisations/infographics  I like

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world This reveals the remotest place on earth according to how long it takes to get to certain places. Interesting fact to come out of the research: only “less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html This visualisation shows how well some movies have done at the box office from 1986 to 2008.

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/ This is a bit of a different take on Datavisualisation. This is the video clip of Radioheads’s house of cards. There was no light or no cameras used in the video clip, just data which is pretty cool check out this url http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/viewer.htm. You can actually use your mouse to show you different perspectives of the video clip.

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