Experiencing Information

I previously blogged about Gapminder and Hans Roslings talk at TED demonstrating this tool. I learned that you can see more eye-opening visualizations on a regular basis with GapCasts, a video blog from Hans and Co. These short videos really show the potential power of information visualizations in enhancing understanding.

One thing I noticed though, is that without a speaker explaining the visualizations, they wouldn’t make too much sense. Or least it would take a while to figure out what they really mean. So, the real challenge of info viz is in the interpretation of the graphs and charts, not in creating the visualizations. But how can a visualization be so self-explanatory that anyone can immediately understand what it’s really saying?

We’ve been getting a fair amount of information in the European media about the presidential race in the USA, but I’ve still not been following things as closely as I should. Came across this resource recently that could help out: Presidential Watch 2008 from Linkfluence. Two interesting things here:

First, the use of information visualization is quite good, I believe. The graphs could be drawn a little better, but overall it’s fairly intuitive to use and provides a good amount of control. The main focus is to show trends–mostly at the source level. And it does this good. I like the Trends Monitor, where you can put two candidates head to head on a chart. (I assume this is a Flex application rendered in Flash on the browser.)

Second, the use of analytics to measure influence is interesting. The Watch includes blogs and communities as well as traditional online media, so you get a fairly broad picture. Looks like they are using volume of links to measure influence, which is a good start. To some degree, they may also be analyzing who is saying what and how they are saying it.

What you don’t get is how much the leading sources of information in the presidential campaign change opinions. Just because lots of people link to a certain political blog, for instance, doesn’t indicate whether others are persuaded to change their opinions. That’s hard to measure, but when talking about influence you ultimately need to know that.

The best talk I saw at the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin this year was from Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Software Architect at Microsoft Live Labs. He showcased the latest updates of Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Labs that stitches photos together from any number of sources to create (the illusion) of a 3-D model of a building or landmark. If you’ve not seen this yet, do so. Here’s a brief video of Blaise showcasing Photosynth at the TED conference.

Basically, the software recognizes unique points on photos of a stationary geo-location and is able to align them with other photos. If you get enough photos in a collection, you effectively have a 3-D version of the original location. Take Notre Dame in Paris: you can point Photosynth at a collection of photos on Flickr, forn instance, and Photosynth compilies a 3-D rendering of the building. Sure, there are some ugly seams, but it’s a pretty amazing results nonetheless. With the ubiquity of digital cameras these days, we could potentially have every place on earth represented in 3-D on the web in the future.

The interesting thing would be to apply this principle to tagging. If you have a rich, complex folksonomy, would you be able to pick out unique descriptive points, and then be able to “sew” the terms together to get a clearer semantic picture of the objects being described? I suppose that’s  what things like Twine are trying to do, in a sense.

Check out Blaise’s TED talk.

Yahoo! has a new service called Map Mixer. You can upload an image of a map of just about anything and overlay this onto a Yahoo! map. There is then an opacity control to show more or less of the uploaded map. This ultimately allows people to tie their local areas and local mapping needs into a broader context.

For example, see the map of University of Southern California. This has far more detail of the campus than a normal Yahoo! map would ever show, but now you can also see how to get to the campus and where it’s located geographically.

You can also show a satellite image for the background map. This is particularly interesting, and it could be great for hiking maps and such. Very simple idea, but also very cool.

Information Architects, a design agency in Tokyo, created this Web Trend Map.

It’s not all that useful, but fun to look at. I have a large poster of the London tube on my office wall–as a sort of homage to early environmental information design.

The Web Trend Map is an interesting metaphor based on a subway map. They put some thought into the relationships between entities, even though it’s impossible to represent them on a 2-D map. It’s also interesting how they integrated weather symbols to show forecasts, something you don’t get (and don’t need) with subway map. It’s a mixed metaphor but works nonetheless.

Google launched an image view of Google News about a month ago. It’s an interesting alternative to text headlines of news stories. I quite like it. I also found myself gravitating towards different stories on the image view than on the normal Google News page, even though some of the images are the same.

The shape of information on the image view is different than on the standard view or text view. It breaks the offline newspaper genre more than online news in general. For one, the notion of priority is different. There is no real headline story, and it’s easier and quicker to dive into all of the articles.

That would make a good study: what is the perceived difference in daily events based on the different formats? I suspect with a typical news layout, the larger headlines in more prominent positions will correlate to people’s perception of what’s going on at that moment. On the image view, there may be other cues, and the top left photo may not have influence just because of its position.

Matt Hurst over at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media points to this interactive map on the NY Times website to track political campaign funding. I guess I’m spoiled by the Trendalyzer mentioned in my previous post, but this level of interactivity is downright tame. It’s smooth and somewhat usable (although the banners and nav at the top of the screen cut of the date range controls so that I didn’t see them until I was done looking at it), but I craved for more interactivity and exposing relationships.

The thing I really wanted to somehow have the ability to overlay two or more candidates’ funding bubbles. Flicking between the two, Obama clearly gets more support from the Chicago area than Guiliani, for instance (which is no surprise). But what other interesting connections and relationships might also be revealed? How’s Barack stacking up to Rudy in NY? Or how about bubbles for Dems vs Reps? I don’t want to knock the NYT for doing this, but there just seems like so many other easy targets that could have made this so much better.

BTW, check out Matt’s blog for other neat things going on in the text mining and analytics realm.

Professor Hans Rosling gave this talk at TED in 2006 and this follow-up talk in 2007. It already made the blog rounds a while back, but I thought I’d post it anyway after re-watching. Incredible use of information visualization. It’s like, “understand the world in 20 minutes.” No wonder Google acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software.

Check out what you can do with some world data yourself.

This kind of visualization will start to become more widespread, I predict, particularly in niche markets. So it’s (once again) a timely acquisition by Google. The future will not about having information or even having access to information. It’ll be about how you make sense of it, and you have to be able to do it quickly. Trendalyzer is a big step in that direction with lots of potential.