3 visual models (click to enlarge)
 the effect of a single recommendation on a single base, (2) the effect of a single recommendation on all affected bases, (3) the effects of all recommendations on a single base, (4) the effects of all recommendations on all bases, (5) the effects of a single base on all affected bases regardless of recommendation, and lastly (6) the effects on a single base by immediately impacting bases regardless of recommendation. (The depicted view currently shows an example of option two: the effect of a single recommendation on all affected bases).')) | ) |
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4 visual models (click to enlarge)
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5 visual models (click to enlarge)
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5 visual models (click to enlarge)
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4 screen captures (click to enlarge)
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4 screen captures (click to enlarge)
) |  to give a cartogrammic representation (upper right), where each unit square represents a single vote.')) |
) | ![](javascript:popUp('popup.php?filename=VT_05.jpg&caption=By reorienting and resorting these bars, we can compare subsets of the data more easily. By re-weighting the influence of the issues listed to the left, users may play "what if" scenarios for different times in US history.')) |
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"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."
- Herbert Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial, 1981)
PIIM believes that solving analytical problems and decision-making dilemmas in a world deluged with data requires clear and intuitive visual representations of those data.
PIIM advances interface design and data visualization methods to help clients clarify, navigate, and present their content.
About PIIM
The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) is a university research and real-world application facility within The New School. PIIM's mission is to advance tool and interface design, visualization methods, and underlying models to create applications for practical analysis and decision-making.
PIIM's visualization-driven, rapid prototyping and development model assures effective team communication and innovation while fulfilling engineering goals in a cost- and time-effective manner.
Contact PIIM
William Bevington
The New School
55 West 13th Street, Room 213
New York, NY 10011
Email: bevingtw@newschool.edu
BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) Visualization
The 2005 BRAC recommendation describes in great detail the flow of troops, civilian jobs and military equipment that will occur over the next ten years in response to a massive base realignment and closure scheme. This information, however, is spread over many hundreds of pages that obscure the interdependencies between states as well as economic and environmental ramifications.
PIIM's visualization provides a more intuitive and faster access to BRAC dynamics that would allow decision makers to delve into the details that specifically show how decisions made at bases impact the dynamics of the people and economy in even distant states.
Emergency Operation Center
Shared Situational Awareness (EOC) Tool
This desktop-based visual platform is an integrated, intuitive environment for enabling situation awareness, in use by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The EOC allows users to "drill down" for further information about narrative event data, and to share and exchange such information.
PIIM provided the conceptualization, storyboarding, visualization and design of the graphical user interface.
Key features include:
The EOC tool brings together geospatial data, situation reports, data feeds and video teleconference capabilities through a single platform.
Agencies can share data feeds among themselves, with users accessing feed location, output and metadata.
User lists, organizational information, and shared task lists allow for collaboration across agencies and locations.
Users can access map views and full-text reports from summaries.
Agencies can share data feeds among themselves, with users accessing feed location, output and metadata.
User lists, organizational information, and shared task lists allow for collaboration across agencies and locations.
Users can access map views and full-text reports from summaries.
Network Analysis & Visualization
Network visualizations are proving to be critical tools in the arsenal of understanding massive, yet incomplete and potentially unreliable data. Networks can be represented in a multitude of forms. Node-link diagrams can expose network vulnerabilities, highlight optimal paths, and cluster nodes for analysis. Radial formats provide alternate ways of layering, integrating, and navigating networks. Quantitative icons can help to explore the dynamics of interacting subnetworks.
By considering data as annotated nodes and links in a network, a high-level, highly integrated view of the data emerges, exposing patterns and anomalies that might otherwise be extremely difficult to detect. The possibilities for diagramming networks are extensive. Unique visualizations tailored to different network analyses can be generated to provide the user with the most effective means to understand the underlying data and make discoveries based on those data.
SOURCE
Do We Know What We Don't Know?
Source is a proposed software environment where a community of researchers will be able to contribute information at any temporal or spatial resolution, and at varying levels of detail and formality. The tool will highlight data that are consistent across datasets with regard to data format, resolution and availability. The tool will also highlight those aspects that remain incommensurable. Additionally, the researchers will be provided a set of visualization tools that will allow them to analyze and reason with both quantitative and qualitative information as well as gauge what areas of the information space are still poorly defined, thus fostering future work and data gathering.
When applied to test case data about the cities of New York, Mumbai, and Shanghai, Source highlighted an abundance of data from Mumbai compared with the other two cities. This does not suggest there are more data for Mumbai than New York, but rather that the team of scholars were largely experts on Indian urban research and had not sufficiently built their knowledge base for a true comparative study. The tool made explicit and visually accessible how much of what kinds of data were available, exposing problems with the researchers' assumptions and intuitions.
Geospace & Media Tool (GMT)
The Geospace & Media Tool is an advanced information visualization application that ties incoming news flow with geospatial, census, and human network data. Related news articles are scored and aggregated into single, convenient event files. Easy-to-use graphic and geographic visualizations give the user the ability to see events, demographics, organizations and current as well as past professional connections between people.
Key features include:
Detailed content and metadata on every news article
Full dossier of individuals mentioned in every news article
Ability to track and search events by location, topic, and customized filters
Automatic extraction and aggregation of related network and statistical data
Visual display of network connections between professionals
Access to hundreds of statistical values specifically relevant to each news article, accompanied by map overlays
Full dossier of individuals mentioned in every news article
Ability to track and search events by location, topic, and customized filters
Automatic extraction and aggregation of related network and statistical data
Visual display of network connections between professionals
Access to hundreds of statistical values specifically relevant to each news article, accompanied by map overlays
Information Visualization Database: www.infovis.info
The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) is building this searchable database of information graphics from visitor submissions and numerous repositories on the internet. It was begun as an internal resource for PIIM employees, as a purely academic endeavor (all sources are cited). Part of our research program is to classify these and other information graphics according to a taxonomy under development.
As the database has grown, we felt that it could serve as a generally useful resource. We are accepting submissions with the goal of establishing the most comprehensive, manually annotated (and taxonomically classified) information graphics database in the world.
We anticipate that it will be a valuable resource for research and for education at all levels, and that it will also be of general interest to a wide audience on the internet. In particular, the images will be important for procuring stimuli for various perceptual and cognitive psychology experiments, and will serve as a rich resource for teaching about the history and scope of visualization methods and design within and across disciplines.
Public Opinion Tool: www.publicopiniontool.org
This tool helps users to understand the electoral voting process of the United States. It includes multiple visual rendering options for every US presidential election ever held, including alternate outcomes based on re-weighted emphasis of particular contemporary issues. As a teaching device, the Public Opinion Tool aids student comprehension of the full context of US history from the standpoint of public opinions on issues during each national election.
Quotations over Time: www.qovert.info
Quotes over Time tracks the top-quoted people from Reuters Alertnet News on a range of topics, and presents their quotes on a timeline. The present time range spans the last few months of 2006, and will soon be set up to run indefinitely, gathering, parsing, and presenting quotes from news stories. When visiting the site, please click on the graphs and quotes to see full stories.
Quotes over Time was begun as an internal resource for employees at the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) as a purely academic endeavor (all sources are cited). As it has garnered interest, we felt that it could serve as a generally useful resource, particularly for news organizations, policy analysts, and media analysts.