randomosity

There was a time when the the brilliant illuminated manuscripts of Irish Monasteries represented the passionate collection of the works of the solitary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intricate knot patterns are a study in a real pattern language. Years ago, when my creative juices were sought a middle ground between a clear systematic approach and yearning to find break out of these same systems, I discovered the work of George and Iain Bain. - father and son. The elder Bain made a lifetime study of finding the patterns in the knotwork and devising techniques to allow others to appreciate these and to replicate these celtic masterworks for themselves. His son built on these techniques to devise a an even simpler way of creating the elabourate designs. I was hooked and produced some large scale knot patterns. I also discovered the wonder of doodling in square and triangular knot patterns. At one point I even delved into zoomorphical celtic artwork and dicsovered and even larger challenge.

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I use both GraphViz and OmniGraffle to construct charts involving relationships and processes. Over the last few days I was noodling my way through a schematic of sectarian associations in Northern Ireland. Trying to get the players and organizations straight was simply impossible for me without some sort of visual aid. I did a quick scan of the usual suspects to determine whether anyone already had something that would suit my needs, but only found textual compilations. Although comprehensive, these required more than casual scans to get an immediate sense of who fits where. I put the chart before the horse this time and started drawing on a napkin. I presupposed that I would need to visually distinguish between political organizations and paramilitary ones, and also between religio/political affiliations. The colours green and orange sprang to mind as good visual cues ;-) Chronology was also a factor and I had an additional temporal dimension to consider. The napkin was overwhelmed.

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I hadn’t been to the Digg Labs area in a while. Wow. They have a wonderful assortment of story and author visualization tools available there that are both mesmerizing and thought provoking. Navel gazing is a wonderful past-time and methinks that Digg is making a concerted effort at perfecting the art. I am particularly attracted to the new Arc tool. Its shows story popularity in realtime and also makes a link between stories dugg by the same users. Thicker vectors indicate story popularity. Interesting.
The Stac visualization is also extremely cool. A collection of stories represented by bars of varyiong shades based on popularity spread across the bottom of the screen and then as they are dugg, weight blocks fall from above reinforcing the story title. Just neat. And as before far to mesmerizing.
Its a quick way to gauge popularity and user activity. The animation is smooth and entertaining. Popular of course has nothing to do with my interest or relevance, but the visualization is effective in conveying the info and it does make a fine screensaver. Apple’s new RSS visualizer in Leopard is another cool infofeed screensaver. Visually stunning.

I have a few friends on Facebook. Last week at the Social Network/ing Conference, I was reminded that the Many Eyes application has a Facebook application that quickly grabs your social network and allows you to paste it into Many Eyes to get a quick visualization of your social network. I finally got around to trying mine.

I just happened to take a quick peek at the camera stats at Flickr today. I had uploaded and explored this data on ManyEyes a years or so ago and perhaps not surprisingly noted that Canon dominated the point-and-shoot market and that Nikon and Canon were battling for dominance in the DSLR market…all according to Flickr postings which may create some skew. Intriguingly when I took a quick look at the posting numbers by camera today, there’s something else very interesting happening: fewer people seem to be using the most popular camera models. Is the market diversifying on a model or manufacturer basis?
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What a treat! I had had the honour of meeting and spending the last two days chatting with Fernanda Viégas from the Visual Communications Lab. Her work has been and continues to be inspirational for me personally and to the information visualisation community more substantially. She presented a tantalizing talk at the Social Network/ing conference at OISE/UofT. ‘Visualizing and Analyzing Social Networks’ quickly demonstrated a small facet of Many Eyes to a new audience and gave us a sneak preview of a new tool soon to be available through ManyEyes called PivotGraph. The logic of the PivotGraph is one of those ah-ha moments - it makes all the sense in the world, but leave it to Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg to visualize the problem, and come up with a brilliant way to solve it. Consider that social networks have traditionally been visualized in two ways: the node-link map and the matrix. The common to node-link method is very intuitive, but also becomes quickly cluttered and loses visualization value as the scale of the network being mapped grows. The second is the representative matrix, which scales very well, but sacrifices intuition for clarity. Realizing that there had to be a way of combining the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses, the PivotGraph hybridize these two forms using a collapsible node-link metaphor that, interactively aggregates like nodes and allows for focus on individual vectors. It’s nothing short of amazing to see in action!
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Jim Pickworth pointed me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleeping and missed pointers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amazingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mission of data liberation. His talks have seemingly inspired the UN to release public health data that had been kept a guarded secret. Armed with this data he has created a wonderful flash based data animation tool called GapMinder. The tool is fun to play with if only purely from a visualization perspective. That he has provided UN worldwide data on matters such as infant mortality, carbon emissions and wealth, allows a layperson such as myself to explore the relationship between these variables for individual countries.

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Today I had a wonderful discussion with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. These are the fine folks behind the Many Eyes website that I blogged about a few months ago. Since launching their site, they have been hard at work bringing us new means of visualizing datasets and providing a social network for dataheads. My earlier article I spoke glowingly of the attention to detail that the site exhibited and wealth of charting opportunities offered. I also promised I would play more with the site.
In the last few months I have had an opportunity to just that.
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Apparently, when the going gets tough, Canadians turn to lawyers. I have semi-arbitrarily qualified the two world wars as national crises (yes, we could argue over what other crises may well have faced the nation, but for sake of simple conjecture I will use these), and examined what occupations emerge amongst our elected representatives. During both world wars, members of the legal profession end up as the dominant non-Parliamentary career in the House of Commons. There is only one other point at which they are the dominant occupational group…
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Information Aesthetics points to a great background article on the visual representation of taste in Ratatouille (a movie I absolutely recommend - great story, superb animation). I watched these sequences and didn’t think much about them - but what a great question : how can one visually demonstrate the sensation of taste? Additionally, how do tastes sound - the animations that Michael Gagne created for the movie were used as inspiration for the accompanying soundtrack. Is this a sign of sensory convergence? That flavours will combine and produce an entirely new visualization makes absolute sense, but how do you account for synergy or for catalytic behaviour. What a wonderful challenge to be presented with and to muse about.
There is a lot more to discover at Michael Gagne’s site. His work had appeared in a string of well known productions. Moreover, Gagne is a Québecois and Sheridan graduate - so wonderfully close to home.
I wonder what smell looks like?