Nothing to Represent Something
On the 6th of September 2014 the conference “Visualise it!” took place in Utrecht. One of the speakers was Andy Kirk, his presentation ‘The Design of Nothing‘ focused on the question: ‘what...
Data Journalism in the Netherlands
Tuesday the 6th of December 2011. Trending topic on Twitter is #nederlandvanboven. Non-Dutch users are confused, what is this hashtag so many people are tweeting about? It is the television documentary Nederland van Boven (the Netherlands from above), inspired...
The New Cartographers #1, Pedro M Cruz
Pedro M Cruz created recently a Project related with the visualization of Traffic in Lisbon. His project lets you see the city waking up through the motion of traffic on its main arteries and fading away towards the end...
Getting data, sharing data and raising political awareness.
Using vision to amplify cognition. According to the Light Switch Theory, vision appeared on Earth around 543 million years ago and triggered the Cambrian explosion (evolution’s Big Bang). Before that none of the living entities could see and relied to...
Where should I live? Visualizing well-being in different countries
Raw data on its own does not contain much meaning. It presents values of quantitative or qualitative variables that are results of measurements and computations. Data needs some context so that it can be analyzed and visualized in...
Too long; Didn´t watch
We all know the feeling – there are just not enough hours in the day to attend to all the interesting things out there. There might now be a solution for at least one aspect of the dilemma, a solution, that people...
Show, Give and Hack: A Call for Open Data
I’ve got a confession to make. When I’m watching the news and the newscaster starts talking about the national and global economy, I find it hard to maintain interest. Of course, this is due to the fact that it...
Information visualization within Web 2.0: Google Flu Trends and Foursquare
Every day, users on the Web generate large amounts of data. At the same time it seems that the use of information visualization has increased with the rise of Web 2.0. The term information visualization is defined by Stuart...
The Building Blocks of Information Visualization
Thursday Christian Behrens and Yuri Engelhardt did a workshop on the Universiteit van Amsterdam on the building blocks of information visualization. Christian Behrens created out of his master thesis on designing pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design,...
Using open data to analyse patterns
In the last few years data has become more and more important. Government agencies and commercial companies create and collect a lot of data. On the internet users are increasingly generating data through clicks, likes and other metrics such...
Data Visualization: A Case Study of Information is Beautiful Awards
By Qianyu Feng, Dania Awin, Marta Espuny, Kirsten Hartman Intro & conceptualization. Living in a data-driven world, data visualization is becoming more and more relevant. Developed from scientific visualization, information visualization gained its popularity in the 2000s with the...
Visualizing what is happening
Going through an older post in the MoM’s blog referring to Walter’s Ong book “Orality and Literacy”, I discovered a term referring to a new “hybrid form” of culture that has spread on the internet: The Secondary Orality. The term is emphasizing...
Visualizing for different purposes
In my previous blogpost, I finished with the statement that there are many other authors (besides Manuel Lima) that talk about artistic ways of information visualization and the distinctions these cultural practices have from traditional (conventional academic) information visualization....
The Innocence of Infographics
Interactive infographics are becoming a major trend in data visualization. Infographics are a relatively new way to simplify complex stories, data and findings. They can be very useful in organizing a large amount of information in an easy...
Tracking the Stars: Co-star and the Creation of the Digital Celestial
Ayoub Samadi Introduction A centuries old practice clad in contemporary systems of information processing. For millenia, astrology has been engulfed in the depths of time and rationality and has not only until recently began to regain the reverence it...
Show Me the Data 2012
Show me the data is an annual conference about data visualizations, developed by multidisciplinary students of the master New Media and Computer Science at the UvA and Editorial Design at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design...
Graphical Primitives versus Direct Visualization
A rectangle walks in a bar and orders a drink. An attractive circle sits on a bar stool next to the rectangle. ‘Hey Circle, want to get primitive?’ The Circle looks the rectangle slowly up and down and says:...
Politwittic
Politics in the age of new media have different characteristics than the politics before the year 2000. Since its launch, the World Wide Web revealed itself as a powerful tool to reach a large part of the (wealthy) population....
www.visualcomplexity.com
“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as...
Does Form Ever Follow Function?
I was lucky enough to attend to the Infographic Congress, in Zeist, on March 1st 2013. Dedicated to data visualization, this congress featured numerous speakers whom all presented data visualizations. Some of these graphic works were so old that...
Notes from Visualizing Europe: the power and potential of data visualization
Last week I attended Visualizing Europe, a one-day conference where a very interesting and diverse group of data visualization experts and designers talked about the power and potential of data visualization. Below are some notes and comments on some points...
Cinemetrics: Creative Ways to Measure and Visualize Movie Data
Visualizations with meta data from movies is nothing new, however those mostly depict available data sets about movies’ budgets, box office and their awards. Only recently designers and film historians with the help of media visualization techniques and tools...
The University of Amsterdam’s ‘Great Man Theory’ on Wikipedia
Together with Erik, I’m working on a Digital Methods project called ‘Repurposing the Wikiscanner‘, where we try to adopt the infamous tool for uses other than scandal hunting. We’re still working on it, but here’s a nice preview. So...
Visualizing Political Chatter
With regards to political campaigns, the Internet has attracted the attention of politicians, researchers and the general public. During the last years the medium has developed into one of the most important – if not the most important –...