Protein® Feed
Infosthetics Takes a Break...
On this side of the planet, the summer has just started. Hence infosthetics is finally taking a long break to get away from it all, and will enjoy the western side of its spectacular host country in a +2,500km (+1,500 miles) motorhome road trip. Naturally, postings will be dramatically less for the next weeks, unless you really want to hear about some gorges, beaches, dolphins, whale sharks, and the inevitable sunburn.
FeedVis RSS Feed Tag Cloud Generator
FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.
Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words.
SpatialKey: Time and Location Based Information Mapping
The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey [spatialkey.com] is marketed as a "next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System". It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from "Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)" to "San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)"
In practice, users can view and overlay all sorts of "geo-temporal data" (data with recorded location and time information) and generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map.
Growth of a Twitter Graph
Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked
systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has
also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest
pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the
growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to
understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract
over time.The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the
first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people.
Random Lissajous Webs
Keith Peters is a generative artist who works mostly in ActionScript 3.0. The images shown here are just part of a growing body or remarkable work which he showcases on his website Art From Code. The quality of the work is almost as impressive as Keith's unpretentiousness. As he explains: "Sometimes I make something that looks nice and put it up here. I call it 'generative art' (...) Other people have different ideas on exactly what generative art means, or what a piece has to consist of or what should have gone into it in order for it to merit that title. So it's up to you what you want to call it.
Sharedegg
The images shown here are from an etnographic study which resulted in an engaging visual outcome, not common in this type of analysis. As the authors of the study explain: "Much of modern society is defined by material goods. In that sense, people are defined through other people's eyes based on what they do and do not or cannot own. Whether people admit it or not, judgments are made about people based on what they look like and what they own.
2008 Presidential Candidate Donations
In an effort to better understand the patterns within the 2008 presidential candidate donations, the authors produced this interesting diagram, mapping all donations made between January 2007 and July 2008, to McCain (left in red) and Obama (right in blue). The two inner circles represent the total amount of donations for both candidates, while the outer segments illustrate variations in the amounts donated. The top-most bracket is any donation between $1 and $100, the second: $101 - $500, the third: $501 - $,1000 and the final: all amounts over $1,000.
2008 City Railway System
According to the authors, each city's various subway structures and railway
systems should reflect somehow the character of that city. In an effort to
infuse the city's identity into its subway map, while also trying to
simplify and beautify the original diagram, Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol produced
a series of original maps for three city subway systems - the Seoul Railway,
Tokyo Railway and Osaka Railway. More cities are in the design phase and
others are being planned.The first image depicts Tokyo's intricate
network of subway, lightrail and monorail, with more than 1500 stations
covering the metropolitan area. Placed in the city center is the Imperial
Palace, the residence of the current Ten-no (Japanese Emperor). Subway lines
circumvent the expansive ground claimed by the Imperial Palace.
commenTree
commenTree uses Adobe Flash to essentially mine through hundreds of thousands of MySpace profiles, their biographies, their interests, and their comments. This data is then presented in the form of a graphical network interface displaying users in a organically connected manner. CommenTree aims to explore the various functions meshing real world and online
interactions.Users in the commenTree visualization are presented as orbs of different colors representing their gender, blue - males and pink - females. Each user has an icon associated with them depicting how much they comment. Less talkative individuals are shown with one speech bubble, whereas the most talkative have Three.
Level-of-Detail Visualization of Clustered Graph Layouts
The images shown here are from a paper presenting a series of techniques that enable a comprehensible interactive visualization of large and complex clustered graph layouts either in 2D or 3D.
