I’m reposting the Data Crunching Artists post from a while back on my personal blog. I’ve been thinking about it again because I saw this sign posted on the street for dog daycare services. I wish I had taken a picture but to describe it, there were a bunch of checkboxes for stuff like:
-walks
-feeding
-love
-attention
and I thought, could I just check certain boxes and leave some out? If I wanted to skip love could I get a discount? Is this an information representation fail?
That said, here are some really nice examples of interesting visual representations of data from Wired:
My two favorites from the group are-
We Feel Fine
This one collects data points from all the social networking sites that mention the word “feel”. You look at these data points, they are represented by a bunch of tiny shapes bouncing around like a particle generator looking thing. And if you roll over them you can see the post where “feel” was used. Then if you click the shape it composites the post over an image. I’m not sure where the image comes from but the posts often moved me.
Dreamlines
“A Web based app that daydreams on the user’s behalf.” You enter a word or two and the app searches Google Images, then reads the color value of each pixel retrieved to drive the direction of particles in a seemingly random swarm. The picture evolves while you are watching it. It’s pretty nice.
