Last week I attended the the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. I want to share with you one session that relates to one of our concerns at Darwin. Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design spoke on Real Time Data and the Power of
Visualization. before I go there I want to share an image that I felt was a greta visualization. The city is very
proud of their New Orleans Saints football team that is going to the Super Bowl
for the first time in the 43 years of playing here. On the left is an American
flag Saints style that I saw here in the Uptown area. While the colors are not exactly the same as this blog, they do go with it.
Ben labeled his talk, Shapes
in the Cloud. His company is a boutique design firm in San Franciso. He talked
about how data visualization affects both the front and back end of data. Webtrends
also actively supports innovation on both ends.
Ben went through a series of
their projects, beginning with a virtual town hall for Moveon.org. in
2004. Moveon.org wanted to invite
guests to talk about the political issues in the 2004 US election. They wanted
some visualization to support the audio on the web site. You logged into the
site with your zip code. You would then see a map and see the participants by
location. This gave you a sense of the audience. It was dynamic so you could
bee to progression of attendees and see the growth.
Next, you could see results
from polls related to the speakers. The data would change as the results rolled
in, again in the map format so you continued to get a sense of community. This
showed the dynamic aspects of data as a medium. Ben said that data can be a
mirror and people and communities can use to see more about themselves.
Next, Ben talked about their
work with Digg In 2006. Digg is
one of the top news aggregation sites. Ben’s firm formed a partner ship with
Digg, to create a site called Digg Labs to show visualizations and the dynamics
of interactions. He showed a
display where stories and their supporters are displayed. You can see the
evolution of voting patterns. If people vote for more than one story you can
see the connections. This visualization is still playing at digglabs.com. These
and other visualization show the dynamics of the Digg community and the
evolution of stories. You see the explosion of votes as popular stories break.
Stack is another digglabs visualization that shows the pattern of story votes
over time.
Ben’s firm also did a visual
hurricane tracker for MSNBC. The visualization simultaneously shows the effects
over time, as well as the present status. You can drill down from the high level view to get details.
There is the live version and the historic version. Both are still live at
MSNBC.com./hurricanetracker You
can parse the data to see only level 5 hurricanes, for example. You can
patterns of movement.
Trulia Hindsight shows
historic views of home construction. Trulia has access to data from tax assessments
in the US. You can se the patterns of development as a city emerges. He showed
parts of San Francisco from 1848 to 2003 so you can see how the city grew. The
process of creating the visualization helped the Trulia data people to better
understand what was within their data.
Ben next talked about
Crimespotting in Oakland. This project shows where crimes occur in Oakland.
They took data form the city web site and then rebuild how it is visualized to
make it more understandable. They did this as test case. You can see when
crimes happen, as well as where. You can parse the data by different dimensions
such as time of day.
The last project is SFMOMA
ArtScope to provide immersive art browsing. For the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, they put the entire catalog from the museum into a site. They made
it into a slippery map format (like Google Maps) that allows you to move over
images. You can see paintings as they were acquired over time. You can the
patterns of collection. I wish the Boston MFA had this application.
Ben and his firm do some
very creative work that does demonstrate the power of good visualizations.