Wordle is a “toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

The useful thing about this is finding out the word use trends you might have in a document, or to find the key topics.

Here’s a visualisation of one of my project descriptions:

wordle visualisation of text

Webpages as Graphs

Here’s an applet that traverses the html of a web page and turns it into a nifty graphic visualisation.  Great for  making the underlying structure clear. (Developed  by Ahare)

The great thing about this is the colour coding for the pages.

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags 

I’m not convinced that it is the most useful tool, although it does tell us the something about the amount of tables, links etc on a page, the tree like visualisation doesn’t best make comparison between quantity of items clear. A bar chart of each element would be better for that. Fun nonetheless.

Here is a graph of the web page, sarahwaterson.net

graph of the index page.

Here is a graph of Amazon:

graph of amazon's frontpage

I was trying to explain to my communications colleagues the other day about what designers do. To me it is obvious, we both map information to communicate better, but we also design the interfaces for that map and strategise about platform delivery and engagement. Sounds very much like what communications people do too. The key to this is to outline the territory as dealing with multiple media ecologies, and that requires strategic design thinking and methods. I guess that makes us all information professionals.

Designers make maps, cartographies of information.

In making maps designers are designing tools, and they are also designing the interaction with that tool.

We now have new map-making methods and roles. The old ones aren’t comprehensive enough.

Maps, or more precisely interfaces are the new media ecologies

The new tools for these maps are platforms

The new map-makers are the information professionals.

Here’s a great image for the day:

The hierarchy of digital distractions

After seeing Sydney sider Keith Loutit’s tilt shift videos, which are very intriguing and cute, I set about trying to emulate the effect in photoshop with some success.

For those that haven’t heard of it before, Tilt-Shift is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated to resemble a photograph of a miniature scale model. Very appealing to the model train set admirers in all of us! By distorting the focus of the photo you can simulate the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses. This makes the scene seem much smaller than it actually is. Taking the photo from a high angle further enhances the affect of looking down on a miniature. Objects oriented horizontally make better subjects for tilt-shift miniature faking than vertically oriented objects.

You can achieve the tilt shift look by either shooting with a special tilt shift lens, or by manipulating the photo in photoshop. Basically you blur the top and bottom of the photograph so that only the subject is in focus using an editable gradient map, and bump up the contrast of the picture to simulate the harder shadows of a miniature under a light and increase the saturation. 

For those of you that wish to try this at home, there is a handy tutorial here which I used for my examples above. Enjoy!

The search for new forms of communication is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the contruction of a passionate life.

Raoul Vaneigem

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. 

Raoul Vaneigem 

Chapter 20 of _The Revolution of Everyday Life, Left Bank Books and
Rebel Press, 1983.

Data visualisation is being recognised as the communication tool for our times. We are drowning in stats, and have massive amounts of data to make sense of. As more and more data sources are available, the toolsets for displaying relationships and quantifying over time are emerging for general use.

Rather than blog about all of the visualisation tools and examples I have been reviewing lately, check out my del.icio.us links down on the left.

One of the ones I do need to mention is Gapminder.I first saw this on TED talks, and was amazed at the simplicity. The visualisation techniques aren’t that new, but the strategy is : harness global support and make databases opensource. Fantastic! Seems like this could be successful too, they have a version you can use on iGoogle, and facility for sharing stats: Official Google Gadget. Motion Chart: A dynamic flash based chart to explore several indicators over time.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

Visualize Click Data with CrazyEgg For webmasters looking for a visual output of where users click on their site, CrazyEgg’s heat maps are an option. The recent upgrade of Google Analytics includes a Site Overlay with click data, so it may be just a matter of time until it also adds a heat map feature.

walk2web

lets you start by entering a URL, and then allows you visually browse web sites that are linked from it. On the right, a large screen capture of the selected web site is shown to give you a preview of site content.

Quintura

allows you to enter in a search topic and then presents a split screen with a tag cloud on one half and search results in the other. In this example, a search for “The Sopranos” brings up a cloud with links like “hbo” and “television” on the left, with direct links to web sites on the right.

digg labs / stack

Digg users “stacking” up on top of stories, so as more diggs come in, the higher the respective stack grows.

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

An oldie but a good one. Visual Thesaurus allows you to navigate the dictionary visually. By typing in a word, you can see its synonyms, and then navigate to one of them to see its’ synonymous and so on and so forth. – An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words that you explore using an interactive map.

I have just come across this useful blog by the CouNTess. I know things have slipped over the last 10 years, but was not aware of just how far. I remember the days of affirmative action for women artists, seems those days are needed again. I am not surprised by the data, just sad.

gender representation in australian galleries

table from the CoUNTess.

Just came across Julian Oliver’s levelhead project. Such a simple maze game with a simple and compelling interface. lovely. You rotate and tilt a physical cube to move a tiny player through rooms – the object being to get through the maze. a memory game…

it is great when the content matches the interface so completely.

Few lives left for Second Life.

Hmmm the Sydney Morning Herald really need to lift their game in researching even cursorily “news” articles, and quoting out of context. It is a huge leap of logic to go from “But Australians appear to have lost interest in Second Life and the users still there appear to be shying away from the big corporate brands.” to say SL is dead. Gee I wonder why corporate brands aren’t the place where SL residents want to visit? It’s a bit like saying Facebook is dead because users didn’t load and use the coke application, or the McDonalds clown smileys….hmmm. wonder whose media interests this type of misleading journalism serves? Could that be flatland?
…..

Molecular surface of the capsid of human rhinovirus 16, one of the viruses which cause the common cold. Protein spikes are coloured grey for visual clarity.