iathings

cartolleria:

Squirrel Highways Nervous squirrels, afraid of an attack on the ground, use the phone and television cables as highways wherever the tree canopy’s broken. Birds rest on the power lines. Image and caption copyrighted Denis Wood & Siglio Press reproduced with permission. (via Brain Pickings | Kirstin Butler)

Berlin based designer and programmer Christopher Warnow had a closer look at the interest graph between people reading the same books. He developed an application that loads recommendations for a given book on Amzon.com and converts visualizes the information as a network. Soon, milieus of interest emerge showing related topics and additional literature.

The application is written in Processing leveraging the power of the open source graph visualization library Gephi Toolkit. You can download the tool and read more information on Christopher’s website.

Christopher Warnow is part of the studio for generative design Onformative and the media art collective We Are Chop Chop.

dbreunig:

• Water, 1400
• Land, 1840
• Gold, 1850
• Wire, 1880
• Air, 1900
• Celluloid, 1920
• Plastic, 1950
• Space, 1960
• Silicon, 1980
• Networks, 1990
• Data, 2000

Another big event in 2012 has just been announced: Resonate New Media Festival . On March 16-17 20 speakers from Europe, Asia and North America will come present at the Dom Omladine in Belgrade, Serbia. To the day program of talks, workshops and panel discussions the organizers added an awesome night program with concerts, DJ sets and visual performances. Looks like something you should not miss!

Resonate is setting new standards in the arts industry by creating a new platform for networking, information, knowledge sharing and education. It will bring together distinguished, world class artists, with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture. It’s more than just a festival, expert seminar or exhibition of visual arts. It is broad enough to encompass areas ranging from software engineering to visual arts theory, but also to create a bridge between culturally separated segments of the artistic and intellectual scene through a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach.

The list of confirmed participants includes Nicholas Felton, Josh Nimoy, Jer Thorp, Greg J. Smith, Regine Debatty, Champagne Valentine, Niklas Roy, Benjamin Gaulon, Martial Geoffre-Rouland, Karsten Schmidt, FIELD, LAb[au], Rafaël Rozendaal, United Visual Artists, Written Images, Jürg Lehni, WARP, onedotzero and others.

We are happy and proud to support the Resonate 2012 Festival as a media partner and hope you all enjoy this exceptional event.

Substratum Interview:

A compendium of interviews with the incredibly talented speakers from this year’s Eyeo festival. There’s also one with me.

In a recent chat with Jérôme Cukier about the state of visualization related literature, he mentioned Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky’s new book “Designing Data Visualizations” published by O’Reilly. Jérôme noted that it would be a good primer for people who are already working with data and looking for guidance about making their work more accessible. I thought of another group of people who might find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of choices they have to make while working on visualizations: designers with little knowledge about visual perception and how to apply its’ principles to their work. After reading it from cover to cover in just a few hours I can highly agree with Jérôme’s recommendation. Julie and Noah manage to introduce the basics of visualization in a very accessible and comprehensible way. Furthermore, the slim format and of the book makes it a great read for your next flight or train ride.

We are currently working with an intern here at Interactive Things: Flavio Gortana joined us three months ago and continues to surprise us with how fast he picks things up and how persistently he works on his ideas. After having worked on illustrations, iconography and interfaces it was time for him to get started with his first visualization project. “Designing Data Visualizations” should build the foundation for the work ahead. Here’s how Flavio experienced his first introduction to visualization, what he learned and how this helps him to move forward.

What the book taught me

Before starting something new, for me it is always important to know what I’m dealing with and to have a general knowledge about it. I’m not the kind of person able to just jump into something without thinking about it before. Since the only visualizations of real data I’ve made so far were some graphs in physics class, this book provided me with a basic vocabulary of terms and concepts needed to dive deeper into the topic.

I have been aware of my interest in visualized data for a long time and of course, I’ve already seen many different types of graphics that intended to explain a dataset. Until not so long ago, I have not given much thought to the quality, techniques or the concepts behind those. I just took them as they were and I tried to discern the information I was interested in. Of course, some even looked nice and had beautiful color schemes while others didn’t. The major benefit this book gave me was a fundamental change of how I look at a data visualization. It did so not by telling me how to analyze or criticize such graphics, but it provided a solid overview of visualization types and ways to distinguish between them. Furthermore, I learned about the underlying techniques and how to classify visualizations.

A good thing about Designing Data Visualizations — especially for a novice like me — is that it is rather practically oriented than theoretically. The explained concepts are very straight forward and I assume they are directly applicable to real problems. They are not some highly sophisticated theories without much practical relevance. Contrary to the “experimenting – mentality” of many design educations, the authors give clear advice what to do and what to avoid. They also state in the beginning that only one who knows the rules can break them in a suitable way. Of course, this may feel very constraining in the first place. But at the same time the book reveals the diversity of possibilities inside the given constraints. For me this will be helpful to get started very quickly. By exposing and explaining the different elements of data visualization, it also made me think of very trivial things I was not aware of before: Have you ever thought about color not having a natural order like saturation or the size of a shape? Or, have you ever thought about using the area instead of the radius while visualizing data with circles? I did not.

In conclusion I can say that the book answered many questions I had in the first place. It may not provide new or revolutionary concepts, but it shows and explains the existing ones in an understandable, manageable and accessible way. Although this won’t directly lead me to some groundbreaking visualizations, thanks to the good summary I will be aware of the variety of things to consider when visualizing data.

Flavio Gortana is an interaction design intern at Interactive Things. You can learn more about his work and experiences by reading his blog (German).

Peter Jellitsch

Students from the greater Berlin area gathered together on Saturday morning around 10am prepared to design and code away for the next 24 hours. The team behind Visualizing.org didn’t leave any wishes open and prepared excellent working conditions at the selected event location Urania. After a brief welcome message from GE the students learned about the data set they will try to make sense of. The data consisted of German demographics and health care statistics. The teams were assigned with the creation of a visualization that reveals true insights from the data and communicates them in an accessible, innovative and elegant way.

The Presentations

Before the student started working, they had the chance to listen to two of Germany’s best visualizers Moritz Stefaner and Gregor Aisch. With their presentations, they shed some light on the craft, process and peril from their daily work.

Moritz had prepared a packed deck of things that would have been helpful to know beforehand. It truly was a collection of golden tipps for newcomers and also some useful reminders for more experienced practitioners. He talked about how position is on of the strongest encoding techniques, what the difficulties are when working with colors and why we should not neclect uderused attributes like texture or hatching. As always he inspired many thoughts and provoked even more laughs with his content and delivery.

Gregor followed with the presentation of his daily routine as a freelance information visualizer. He introduced a process framework inspired by the highly recommended book Visualizing Data by William Cleveland. His iterative process consists of the following three phases:

1. Visualize the data using tools like R, Tableau or any other spreadsheet software to create sketches of what’s important, interesting or hidden in the data.
2. Learn from your results by noting down all your insights from the previous phase and explain your thoughts with the according charts. The duty of articulating your findings helps you to hone the vision for the ultimate/final solution.
3. Transform the data to achieve a more precise and more accessible visualization and therefore to draw clearer picture on the core message.

The Works

Soon after the presentations, the venue was filled with sketches on paper and whiteboards, laptops running calculations and enthusiastic people bouncing ideas off each other. The creative working athmosphere was truly stimulating and so Moritz, Gregor and myself couldn’t resist to start discussing and hacking as well. After an intense night, the teams handed in 11 visualizations that ranged from static information graphics to interactive visualizations. As I am involved in judging the works, I can’t comment on the works just yet, but Moritz sums it up nicely when he tweets: “I am really impressed by some of the works from the Visualizing Marathon Berlin 2011 #goodjob #toughtimesforjudges“. I recommend you have a look and judge for yourself here.

The Berlin chapter closes the 2011 series of the Visualizing Marathons. Charlene Manuel, of Visualizing.org had nothing but admiring words for the students works, efforts and enthusiasm. I assume nothing stands in the way of Visualizing Marathon 2012.

Memo Atken

Stephen James Kennedy

I am super hyped to introduce our pet project of this summer, called Substratum. It’s a series of inspirational interviews with some of today’s most influential designers and artists. 10 questions per interview, 2 interviews per issue, 1 issue per week until Christmas!

We start today with the first issue titled “Space” containing interviews by Marius Watz and Theo Watson & Emily Gobeille. A total of 14 interviews are in store for you and will be released on a weekly basis. The complete list of names featured in Substratum remains secret, but includes people like Ben Fry, Nicholas Felton and Golan Levin. Here is why we do this:

We want to feel the pulse of the creative community working at the intersection of art, design, and science. They are restlessly weaving together the physical with the digital, turning data into meaning, and creating interactive experiences to generate inspiring insights that encourage us to challenge our own works.

A lot has been talked about the works of these creative makers; we want to find out what they feel and think about their worlds. We want to get to know their beliefs, motivations and limitations. We want to know where they’re coming from and why they do what they do.

Move over to substratumseries.com and subscribe via RSS or Twitter to get updates of new released issues. We hope you enjoy what you see and read as much as we did putting everything together. If you have any questions, suggestions and thoughts for us, please let us know.

Beautiful composite of 400 self-portraits.

dbreunig:

Alexander Chen constructed an interactive music box of Bach’s Prelude from his first cello suite. Check out the live version at Baroque.me. (by Alexander Chen)

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” - William Gibson (via ninedaysoff)

Stefanie Posavec is exceptionally talented.

Jer Thorp, Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times and creative coder extraordinaire, explains the process behind his latest piece for Popular Science in a recent article. The task at hand was to visually represent the complete archive of their publication. The final piece is anchored by a kind of molecular chain – decade clusters in turn contain year clusters. Every atom in these year clusters is a single issue of the magazine, and is shaded with colours extracted from the issue covers via a colour clustering routine. The size of the issue-atoms is determined by the number of words in each issue.

Picking out interesting words from all of the available choices (pretty much the entire dictionary) was a tricky part of the process. I built a custom tool in Processing that pre-visualized the frequency plots of each word so that I could go through many, many possibilities and identify the ones that would be interesting to include in the final graphic. This is a really common approach for me to take – building small tools during the process of a project that help me solve specific problems. For this visualization, I actually ended up writing 4 tools in Processing – only one of which contributed visually to the final result.

It’s excellent to get a glimpse at how such complex yet elegant solutions come together and what decisions were taken along the way. See the related set on Flickr to visually follow the development of the graphic. This isn’t Jer’s first process documentation and if you are not familiar with his work, I strongly recommend to have a look.

Jer Thorp is a software artist, writer, and educator. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK. He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times.

freshphotons:

Cat Physics (PDF).

After a lot has been discussed about Swiss open data at the opendata.ch Conference in June, Hannes Gassert, Oleg Lavrovsky, and I felt the time was ripe to bring designers, developers and ideators together to actually build something. We initiated a national two-day hackathon with the name make.opendata.ch, which was took place simultaneously in Zürich and Lausanne on September 30 and October 1 2011. We expected around 30 participants at each location, but were blown away by the response, and in the end over 100 people showed up.

Open data is still a fairly fresh topic in Switzerland, and data sources weren’t abundant, but we received a lot of support from both host cities. Lausanne provided data about its buildings and their energy consumption, and thanks to the eZürich initiative, we had access to data sets Zürich has just recently published, including the city’s most recent investment statement.

What Was Made

During the two days we not only had some great inputs from experts and data providers and the opportunity to meet likeminded people, but – in the spirit of the event’s name – the participants made some terrific open data applications:

Where Did My Taxes Go?

Inspired by Where Does My Money Go?, this application calculates where tax money of individual Zürich residents went in 2010. As a special twist, it tells you how long the city could run on your contribution (you’d have to earn quite well to get it over a minute).

What Do Parliamentarians Talk About?

This application visualizes which words Swiss parliamentarians used in their motions. It takes into account data which goes back as far as 1995, so it should show accurately who’s interested in which topics. As elections are just around the corner, it’s a perfectly timed and useful (and sometimes quite hilarious) tool.

Mashing Up Swiss Stats

SwissMap enables you to mash up and compare various statistics of Switzerland. You select data sets via drag and drop, and positively correlated data (at least I guess that’s what it is – there’s no legend, ahem) gets highlighted on a map divided by cantons.

Swiss Army Contaminated Sites

Of course we from Interactive Things also made an application! We mapped a data set of over 1500 sites owned by the Swiss army to show the contamination level for each location and on a county level. Did you know the army sank ammunition in a few of our lakes?

There are many more projects covering topics like transportation, hiking maps, political party support, energy use, and water temperature. Efforts were also made in building open data repositories and licensing. All projects are documented in the make.opendata.ch wiki.

A Step Forward

From an organizer’s perspective, I think make.opendata.ch has been a great success. The amount and quality of the projects is impressing, and more importantly, many creative people who care about open data have been able to connect and build something together. Switzerland’s open data movement definitely has made a step forward, a step whose importance can not be overestimated.

And as a participant it just has been so much fun to work in such a spirited environment.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has helped to make this happen, and to everyone who has participated. You have been awesome. See you at the next make.opendata.ch!

Saw this series at the Venice Biennale years and years ago… still thinking about them.

bbbbird:

Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. (via triangulation)