InfoVis recap, part II
There was a very nice introduction/preview of the art exhibit in which the two presenters gave many examples of the intersection of art and information visualization. Here are some of the artists/projects that they commented on:
The work of Jason Salavon. His most famous work is with photo averages--he takes a large number of photos with a particular traditional composition (like a kid sitting on Santa's knee, or bride and groom standing next to each other), and comes up with an "average" resulting image. One example is this set of four pieces, each of which represents one decade of Playboy centerfolds (safe for work). Even with all of the details lost, you can see overall trends. Hair color, for one.
The Secret Lives of Numbers. "This interactive system invites you to explore how the usage patterns of numbers reflect our culture, history, and biology. The data shown represents the 'popularity' of every integer between 0 and 100000 collected periodically since 1997 from a popular search engine." Look especially at the matrix on the right, where the light squares represent more popular numbers. The light colored narrow horizontal band represents the 1900s; the most recent century (unsuprisingly, popular numbers). Lots of other patterns to explore.
WordCount
Hand-drawn social networks of conspiracy theories by Mark Lombardi
They Rule by Josh On. Allows you to investigate your own conspiracy theories in a way. You can pick entities (companies, institutions, people), and see the connections between them. You can also load networks saved by others, with titles like "who really controls foreign policy?" and "don't give me that 'apple is independent' crap."
Mirrr. The project I want to point out is about 2/3 down the page. It's t-shirts with tag clouds taken from people's Flickr collections. An interesting way to display identity.
The work of Ben Fry (old site, new site). I haven't had time to look at most of the links on his site yet, but one cool thing is zipdecode.
The work of Jason Salavon. His most famous work is with photo averages--he takes a large number of photos with a particular traditional composition (like a kid sitting on Santa's knee, or bride and groom standing next to each other), and comes up with an "average" resulting image. One example is this set of four pieces, each of which represents one decade of Playboy centerfolds (safe for work). Even with all of the details lost, you can see overall trends. Hair color, for one.
The Secret Lives of Numbers. "This interactive system invites you to explore how the usage patterns of numbers reflect our culture, history, and biology. The data shown represents the 'popularity' of every integer between 0 and 100000 collected periodically since 1997 from a popular search engine." Look especially at the matrix on the right, where the light squares represent more popular numbers. The light colored narrow horizontal band represents the 1900s; the most recent century (unsuprisingly, popular numbers). Lots of other patterns to explore.
WordCount
Hand-drawn social networks of conspiracy theories by Mark Lombardi
They Rule by Josh On. Allows you to investigate your own conspiracy theories in a way. You can pick entities (companies, institutions, people), and see the connections between them. You can also load networks saved by others, with titles like "who really controls foreign policy?" and "don't give me that 'apple is independent' crap."
Mirrr. The project I want to point out is about 2/3 down the page. It's t-shirts with tag clouds taken from people's Flickr collections. An interesting way to display identity.
The work of Ben Fry (old site, new site). I haven't had time to look at most of the links on his site yet, but one cool thing is zipdecode.
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