The EXTEND workshop with Casey Reas, Ben Fry, Zach Lieberman and yours truly is now underway. Today is the second day, yesterday was spent giving personal introductions and dividing the 18 participants into groups. Each day we have micro-lectures. Zach started off by talking about animation and movement, and showed some examples from his making things move workshop.

The participants have shown significant interest in data visualization, and so Ben presented some background to computational information design. He used his Linkology project as a specific example.

Casey is currently speaking about the history of Processing (traced back to ACU and other MIT projects) and how to sketch with code. He is also talking about the importance of the concept of libraries as a way of extending Processing, and in particular to bring it beyond the screen. In particular, he is demonstrating the new PDF library with some code examples that will soon be posted to the Processing site.

I will sporadically be blogging the workshop over on Code & Form, a new blog I just opened to support workshops, teaching and code experiments.

• Toxi: Quality data for visualizationists, in which he speaks about the lack of freely available data sets for research into information visualization. If there is Open Source, why not Open Data?
• Wikipedia3: An open conversion of the English Wikipedia into a RDF dataset, updated monthly. (link from Toxi’s post)
• Vectors, Hektor and Wobble-Preventing Algorithms. Interview with Jürg Lehni for PingMag, Tokyo. Also available as podcast.
• Ars Simplicity: John Maeda has been announced as guest curator of Ars Electronica 2006.
• Code Snippets: “Snippets is a public source code repository. Easily build up your personal collection of code snippets, categorize them with tags / keywords, and share them with the world” (via TomC)
• Owen Jones: Grammar of Ornament: Digitized free version of Owen Jones’ classic 1868 text on ornament. (via Design Observer)
• Classic Josef Müller-Brockman posters exhibited at Dublin’s Image Now Gallery. (via Design Observer)

Amber Frid-Jimenez and Philip DeCamp: Shrub: Variations on tree structures

Shrub is a series of sketches of tree structures, by MIT Media Lab students Amber Frid-Jimenez and Philip DeCamp. It starts off looking as one would expect, then wanders off into the exotic. Some feel more like drawing than visualizations.

Both Frid-Jimenez and DeCamp were involved in another project called Document Icons, a software sketch designed to allow the user to search through the contents of millions of text documents using histograms. The technique looks like it could also work well for tag heavy sites. Infosthetics blogged it here.

(via del.icio.us/tomc and infosthetics).

With its rich content and well-implemented tagging system, del.icio.us provides a tantalizing data set for would-be information visualizers. Fortunately, the open del.icio.us API allows developers full access to the functionality of the system.

To support the recently launched Processing hacks site I have written up a quick tutorial on how to access del.icio.us with Processing. The hack uses David Czarnecki’s delicious-java library. I also added a simple hack for outputting PostScript vector files.

Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg: The Dumpster

This seems a fitting post with which to celebrate both Valentine’s Day and the end of a 3 week holiday-induced blog silence:

The Dumpster is a visualization of the romantic lives of American teenagers. Extracting breakup-related blog entries from millions of blogs, it charts them along a chronological axis with text excerpts and relevant data like age and sex of the poster. The blog entries themselves are visualized as a pleasantly pastel cluster of bubbles, falling from the top of the screen and percolating to the bottom.

The Dumpster bears some similarities with Golan’s earlier work Secret Lives of Numbers, which was shown in the Generator.x exhibition. It utilizes the same time axis and pixel grid navigation device for accessing the many nodes. The project description claims that the Dumpster reveals “underlying patterns of these failed relationships”, although this is hard to quantify. There is a “Match” data field shown for each entry, this could indicate a match against other entries. Another possibility is that it represents how well the text matches some text pattern used to identify blog entries dealing with romantic breakups.

But even if the numerical relevance of the visualization seems slightly impenetrable, the Dumpster charms the viewer with endless text excerpts demonstrating the banal beauty of love. Despite the large number of entries there seems to be practically no false positives, just endless teenage musings. And given the impeccable timing of releasing it on Valentine’s Day, you can’t fault it.

The Dumpster is a joint commission from Whitney Artport and Tate Online. Along with Turbulence these portals are becoming serious spaces for the creation and publication of more complex online works. Given the difficulty of exhibiting net-based art in a gallery context, even modestly paid commissions become a major incentive for the creation of new work. At the same time, it allows museums like the Tate and the Whitney to dabble in “experimental media” without committing to showing it in their physical spaces.

This looks interesting: WWW 2006 Call for papers for the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem.

Sounds like a challenge for all the infoviz kids out there. I for one would love to see an open depository of data sets, provided under some Creative Commons license. Finding interesting and complete datasets can be a challenge for would-be information visualizers without academic resources. If anyone knows of such a depository, please leave a comment here.

Dr.Woohoo: Color Analytics

With Flash 8, Flash is increasingly becoming a tool for serious visualization. Doug Marttila (lead designer at Visual i|o) has started a blog called The Forest and the Trees to evangelize this combo. As he says: “Data visualization can make the world a better place. Really.”

Marttila’s blog is only a little over a month old and a bit thin on content yet, but he does have some wonderful links. One of them is a color palette visualization called Color Analytics, using the new pixel capabilities of Flash 8. It allows the user to browse through a large database of paintings and see statistical analysis of the colors used in the paintings. It even provides links to other paintings with similar palettes. The piece is an experiment from Dr.Woohoo Brothers, a New Mexico interactive “boutique”.

See The Forest and the Trees for more Flash visualization links. (via dataisnature)

Abigail Reynolds: Mount Fear

Paul wrote a great post over on Dataisnature about non-digital artists working with visualizations. Particularly striking is Mark Lombardi's beautiful maps of political webs of influence in pen and paper, predating Josh On’s classic They Rule. More images can be found here, the image quality is low but one can just make out the artist’s deliberate use of beauty in making these maps of otherwise grim data.

Another example is London-based artist Abigail Reynolds. Her Mount Fear maps crime statistics in a series of models, translating geographically specific crime data into physical spaces:

Reynolds has executed the project in several locations, using local data to create the models, which are made from layers of cardboard and styrofoam. Painstakingingly, layers are built up to create a to-scale topological model of a geographical region, with the height dimension indicating number of crimes in that area.

The images above show the following:

• Crimes with Offensive Weapon South London 2001-2002
• Sex Crimes Eindhoven 1998 and 2003
• Violent crime 2002-03 East London

The models appear as impenetrable, imposing spaces, giving a physical representation of the crime statistics. As with Lombardi (or indeed with any visualization), aesthetic choices have been made as to how the data is represented. The number of crimes given per layer can be scaled down or up to create a less or more imposing model. But giving a clear physical presence to the data gives the viewer a completely different experience.

(Thanks to Christine Wolfe of Unwetter for the link.)

News.com: Hot news visualizations

Unknown: Airport flight densities

The new VisualComplexity site seems to have been an instant hit, with everybody and their sister linking it. Is data visualization ready to hit entertainment mainstream? Will Ben Fry find a welcome side income from publishing posters that will adorn the walls of teenage abodes? Will budget art book publisher Taschen soon produce a glossy coffee table work on infoviz?

Perhaps not. But it’s interesting to note that News.com has added two visualization oldie goldies (the treemap and the associative network) to their traffic-driving sidebar. Such a move would have been considered daring only a few years ago. After all they make their money from page clicks and can’t afford to lose any. So it follows logically that they assume that using dynamic visualizations rather than lists of headlines will drive more traffic. Knowing the internet business, they’ve probably done usability studies on it too.

That diagrams are beautiful can’t be denied, though not always intentionally. On his tecznotes blog Michael Migurski posted a reference to this visually attractive 1981 visualization of flight traffic density between different cities. In low resolution it looks like a street art piece by the London Police.

Peter Merholz has blogged his notes from a lecture that Martin Wattenberg recently gave at UC Berkeley. Martin charted early experiments in visualization, and talked about his works like History Flow, Apartment, Name Voyager and more.