Maurits Cornelis Escher, master artist and creator of tessellations, was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands in 1898. After an aborted attempt to become an architect, Escher studied graphic art at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Over the years and throughout his travels, he created a number of fascinating landscapes, portraits, and geometric designs, but the work for which he is most famous, his tessellations, were his main preoccupation.

Since his first visit to the Alhambra in Spain in 1922, Escher was intrigued by the Moorish mosaics. Escher animated his own versions of the abstract geometrical designs he had seen. Through his extraordinary creativity and an inate understanding of the mathematics involved, Escher created hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of tessellating shapes in the form of fish, birds, dogs, crabs, insects, horses, humans, and other beasts.

In the Escher section of Totally Tessellated, you will find a variety of information about M. C. Escher, but by no means all that is available. When there is a particular reference that will supplement your studies of Escher and tessellations, the reference will be noted. Here you will find a brief bibliography, and introduction to Escher's collective works, and a section on his tessellations, including an analysis of a selection of Escher's best, and instructions on how to create some of your own.

All M. C. Escher works (c) Cordon Art B.V.-Baarn-the Netherlands.

WebPath is "... a tool that unobtrusively visualises a user's trail as they browse the Web", developed by Emmanuel Frécon, a researcher in the Distributed Collaborative Environments group at SICS, and Gareth Smith in the Computing Department, at Lancaster University.




See Frécon and Smith's 1998 paper for more information. "WebPath - A three-dimensional Web History", IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis '98), Chapel Hill. NC, USA.

Superimposed squares to compare areas (of European states).

Crome, A. F. W. (1785). Über die Grösse and Bevölkerung der Sämtlichen Europäschen Staaten . Leipzig: Weygand.

Nikolow, S. (2001). A.f.w. crome's measurements of the strength of the state: Statistical representations in central europe around 1800. In J.L. Klein and M.S. Morgan (eds.), The Age of Economic Measurement . Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press.

The results of the popular vote in the 1996 U.S. presidential race are visualized above using traditional thematic mapping. Each state is colored either a shade of red or a shade of blue, denoting the majority winner of each state as Clinton or Dole, respectively, with color saturation indicating the magnitude of the winning percentage. There is a significant problem with this visualization. Without prior knowledge of population density across the country, the viewer has no clear indicator as to who actually won the election. While this map provides a medium of familiarity, it produces an intrinsic distortion of the very data we are trying to analyze. Since elections are not won on square miles, the results would be better visualized on a map more representative of population. These same election results are shown below on a 1996 equal population cartogram generated using the Constraint-Based Method.

In the last years, Gerhard Dirmoser has developed a set of strikingly complex visualization posters under the theme "Art-in-Context" (Die Kunst der Ausstellung). The form of this context is usually a diagram in the size of a poster (aprox. 240cm x 180cm), split in 4 parts.

In this poster, Dirmoser analyzes most author's contributions to Ars Electronica in the last 25 years. Due to the limitations of the available surface, it wasn't possible to provide a complete detailed presentation of all the participating artists, scientists and developers (about 3100 persons are listed). All the participants were compared with the AEC/Ars database.

The language material used was taken from publications on "ars electronica", notes (on the symposium lectures) and relevant literature. The study "Designing Gestures" on ars electronica 2003 was carried out in parallel. The choice/placement is thus to be regarded as the author of the study's subjective/content-based selection.The study is intended to provide a wide-ranging survey, but it cannot substitute for reading the catalogues. In some cases, key works (or concepts) are cited, which were not shown in Linz, but are described in detail in catalogues. The poster can also be used as an index with the page numbers.

The first image shows one of the four pieces of the poster and the second image is a detailed view of it. To see the poster in a public installation, click here

Grammar of Graphics: A comprehensive systematization of grammatical rules for data and graphs and graph algebras within an object-oriented, computational framework.

Wilkinson, L. (1999). The Grammar of Graphics. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98774-6.

Two examples of the research work of Stephen G. Eick and colleagues at Bell Laboratories into the visualization and analysis of Internet traffic flows. Their 1996 research paper "3D Geographic Network Display" provides further details.

Use of 'nested dimensions' (related to trellis and mosaic displays) for the visualization of multidimensional data. Continuous variables are binned, and variables are allocated to the horizontal and vertical dimensions in a nested fashion.

Mihalisin, T., Gawlinski, E., Timlin, J., and Schwegler, J. (Oct. 1989). Multi-dimensional graphing in two dimensional spaces. Scientific Computing and Automation, 6:15-20.

Mihalisin, T., Schwegler, J., and Timlin, J. (1992). Hierarchical multivariate visualization. In H. J. Newton (ed.), Computing Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 24th Symposium on the Interface, vol. 24, pp.141-149.

From the knotplot.com/zoo website, you can click on a knot to load it into an interactive 3D viewer (requires Java).

From the knotplot.com/zoo website, you can click on a knot to load it into an interactive 3D viewer (requires Java).

Historical time line (life spans of 2,000 famous people, 1200 B.C. to 1750 A.D.), quantitative comparison by means of bars.

Priestley, J. (1765). A Chart of Biography . London: (n.p.). BL: 611.I.19.

Proofs are usually dry, dusty stuff sprinkled liberally with symbols. What about proving something with a picture? This proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is attributed to Bhaskara, a Hindu mathematician of the 12th century. We are given the bottom right triangle. Construct a square by making three copies of the triangle, as shown.

Got it? The side of the small square is b-a, and its area is (b-a)² or b²-2ab+a². The area of our triangle is ab/2. The area of all four triangles is 2ab. Then the area of all four triangles, plus the area of the small square is b²+a². So c²=a²+b².

See also the AMS page: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/whatsnew/column/visual-0300/visual1.html

The usability of knowledge domain visualization (KDViz) tools can be assessed at several levels. Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) is a well-known usability inspection method that focuses on how easily users can learn software through exploration. Typical applications of CW follow structured tasks where user goals and action sequences that lead to achievement of the goals are welldefined. KDViz and other information visualization tools, however, are typically designed for users to explore data and user goals and actions are less well understood.

In this paper, presented at the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization,the authors describe how the traditional CW method may be adapted for assessing the usability of these systems. They apply the adapted version of CW to CiteSpace, a KDViz tool that uses bibliometric analyses to create visualizations of scientific literatures. They describe usability issues identified by the adapted CW and discuss how CiteSpace supported the completion of tasks, such as

a visualization of the entire book collection from Amazon. the size of categories reflects the approximate number of books within that category. users can zoom in to explore the books that are filed under the category, until indivisual individual books are visible. currently still a prototype.

see also amazon treemap & amaztype & music plasma.

From "thepurehands.org" website:

"Walking into the university for me keeps me bumping into people which generate interesting flows of information. The key observation was that of a library. The conversation turned to open and closed stack libraries. Closed stack libraries ( like the British Library) you walk in and order the book you want and that’s what you get. Open stack libraries you get the books your self and you get to see the books near the ones your looking for. This can lead to wonderful accidents.



The software for UCL’s library is closed stack - it tells you about what you asked for and nothing else. We noted that on Amazon acts like a closed stack ( you ask for books it finds them ) and tries to act like a (open shelf) library or a book shop. It does this by presenting similar books to the one you take notice of. We called this ‘slit shelf’ ( between open and closed ). At first we like the notion of producing an interface to all of the UCL library. Trying to get the data would be FAR too difficult for a short project. A little research showed that Amazon had and a way to let developers access all the data (if a little slowly).So the project became to visualise all of Amazon (books).



This was good as Amazon is distinctly pre-Google. The primary web-page is stuffed with information noise. Each page is also overwhelms the reader with considerable excess and irrelevant information. From a design point of view it would be good to bring some clarity to the browsing process. What would you do?"

Social statistical chartbook, containing a variety of graphic and semi-graphic displays in a USA Government report. [This image is a fine early example of a semi-graphic display, showing four variables simultaneously.]

Ayres, L. P. (1919). The War with Germany, A Statistical Summary . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. ISBN 040511852X. Commonly known as the Ayres report; reprinted: Arno Press, NY, 1979.

*Tufte, E. R. (1983). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Marius Watz, Art Director of Generator.x, has used the nom-de-guerre Amoeba since 1995 for experimentation in electronic media, with the web site Evolutionzone.com as the output. In this environment, Watz shows amazing generative art pieces that are both intriguing and captivating.

AmoebaAbstracts 1-3, is a set of 3 experiments in abstract computational composition and dynamic form. The abstracts, responsive to user input, were built with Processing for the exhibition "Abstraction Now", Kunstlerhaus Wien, September 2003, and were also exhibited at Sonar 2004, Barcelona. The images shown are representative of Abstract 2, an endlessly emerging geometric pattern.

This generative piece of visual abstraction doesn't consider any set of actual data, however, its aesthetical visual depiction represents a fresh approach that might prove inspiring to any network visualization endeavor.

First anamorphic maps, using a deformation of spatial size to show a quantitative variable (e.g., the decrease in time to travel from Paris to various places in France over 200 years).

Palsky, G. (1996). Des Chiffres et des Cartes: Naissance et développement de la cartographie quantitative française au XIXe siècle. Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (CTHS). ISBN 2-7355-0336-3.

(Fig. 63-64)

Presented at InfoVis 2001, this project presents a new animation technique for supporting interactive exploration of a graph using a radial tree layout method. As an alternative to trying to fit an entire graph into one view, this project provides exploration of subregions of the graph. Even if a graph is small enough to display all at once, it can be difficult to understand all of its relationships from only a single view. The ability to interactively view a graph from different perspectives can yield new insights.

The authors used a visualization paradigm in which the view of a graph is determined by the selection of a single node as the center of interest, or focus. The main contribution of this work is a new technique for animating the transitions from one view to the next in a smooth, appealing manner. The algorithm augments the well-known radial layout method by linearly interpolating the polar coordinates of the nodes and enforcing constraints on the new layout to keep it as similar as possible to the previous layout. When combined with a method for aggregating or eliding nodes far away from the focus, this technique can also provide an effective way to explore very large graphs.

Third stage in the construction of Antoine's necklace. The next stage would be to replace each component ring in the above with a linked chain of rings. At the end of an infinite number of such steps we are left with Antoine's necklace, an object homeomorphic to the Cantor space.

A potential for a visualization (similar to http://moat.nlanr.net/AS/background.html) maps Autonomous Systems as nodes on the surface of a sphere, and then interconnect via reachability paths. The following visualization attempts to to this, by then also mapping the nine BGP peers (which exchange data with the server in Oregon) onto a site of the sphere opposite the target AS number (90).

The graphic shows the (green) Oregon server on the left site, connected to the (purple) BGP sites, from where then the paths emerge via (yellow) pipes and (red) Autonomous System spheres at the inside of the (blue, transparent) system sphere, towards the (green) target network.

Clifford Ashley (1881-1947), an American painter and writer, is probably better known as an expert knot tyer and the author of the magnificent The Ashley Book of Knots. You could do no better than to go to that source for thousands of intricate drawings of knots and the process of tying them. Since I can't tie a bowline without consulting a manual, I admire Ashley mainly as a drawer of knots. Ashley includes many knots that are primarily decorative. Some of these are closed loops (as are mathematical knots).

I call the knots on this page "Ashley knots," but of course many of them were invented long before Ashley. Please consult Ashley's book to see the origin of each of these knots.

Correlation (and covariance) matrices provide the basis for all (classical) multivariate statistical techniques, but most of these compress the correlations into a low-dimensional summary. How about a direct graphical display?

The correlogram uses two general techniques:

(a) rendering the value of a correlation to depict its sign and magnitude. This image shows just two: circular ``pac-man'' pies, and shading, with diagonal stripes indicating the direction. In both, Blue is used for positive correlations, and red for negative, with the intensity of shading proportional to the magnitude of the correlation.

(b) re-ordering the variables in a correlation matrix so that ``similar'' variables are positioned adjacently. Here, the variables have been permuted based on the angular ordering of the first two principal components.

The figure shows the correlations among 12 measures of 74 automobiles from the 1979 year, from Friendly, M., "Corrgrams: Exploratory displays for correlation matrices" (2002). The American Statistician v.1.5.

Systematic "graphical rational patterns" for statistical presentation.

Bachi, R. (1968). Graphical Rational Patterns, A New Approach to Graphical Presentation of Statistics. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press.

Backchannel is a real-time view of the conversation happening in the #etech IRC channel at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. Stamen Design has a bot observing events in the channel, publishing them as a web-service via XML and JSON, and making them available to a visualization component built in Flash.

A conference backchannel is home to a lot of interesting conversational dynamics: additional context, participation from speakers, visitors from elsewhere in the world, sniping, and coordinated walkouts. The authors were intrigued by the idea of a pointedly live visual environment that would illustrate and respond to this other space.

Each participant in the backchannel is shown in a circle, with nicknames arranged alphabetically, counter-clockwise from right. Blue bars next to each nickname show how active each participant has been. Connections between nicknames show participants who?ve spoken around the same time. Events are marked in a narrow strip across the top, in blue. The most recent events are at right, stretching back in time about three hours to the left.

Windows binary malware has come a long way. Today's average worm is often tens or hundreds of kilobytes of code exhibiting a level of complexity that surpasses even some operating systems. This degree of complexity, coupled with the overwhelming flow of new malware, calls for improvements to tools and techniques used in analysis.

F-Secure produced this rich 3D animation that visualizes the structure and execution of the W32/Bagle.AG@mm worm. The boxes in the picture are functions of the worm. The one on the top is the 'main' where the execution starts. The first ring contains all the functions that 'main' calls. The second all the functions that the ones on the first ones call and so on. All connecting lines represent the calls from one function to the other. Red boxes belong to the virus code while the blue ones are API calls library code that do not belong to the malicious code. The animation was created using IDA Pro, IDAPython, Blender and other custom scripts.

For a direct link to the animation (quicktime required), click here.

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.

After familiarization with an accompanying legend, a user can quickly gain an overall understanding of how each state, and each base, is impacted by the BRAC initiative. Over thousands of data points can thus be reviewed rapidly and in the context of bases, recommendations and the nation.

After familiarization with this legend, one can quickly gain an overall understanding of how each state, and each base, is impacted by the BRAC initiative in the main visualization. Thousands of data points can thus be reviewed rapidly and in the context of bases, recommendations and the nation.

Fort Monmouth Recommendation

This visual snapshot maps the effect of the Army recommendation to close Fort Monmouth Army base and redistribute personnel to other bases within the BRAC initiative. An interactive tool based on all BRAC data will permit six view options. These include (1) 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).

Four-letter words have a special status in the english language and culture. Counting in at over 1650 words, in most cases the term is only used to address the more crude, sexual subset and its use has been effectively eliminated from the language of "good" society, mainly due to its negative connotations with lack of education, etiquette and status. In a way, the use of those four-letter words reflects the schizoid prudence and class system in English speaking societies, still evident today.

base26 is a startling interactive visualization project that attempts to give a spatial overview of the entirety of this part of English language heritage, as well as to explore and visualize relations between all those words. Letters are interpeted as 4D coordinates, shown in a smoothly transforming 3D space, produced with Processing.

Use of area rectangles on a map to display two variables and their product (population of arrondisements in Paris, percent foreigners; area = absolute number of foreigners).

Bertillon, J. (1896). Fréquence des étrangers à Paris en 1891. In Cours élementaire de statistique administrative. Paris: Societé d'éditions scientifiques. (map).

Palsky, G. (1996). Des Chiffres et des Cartes: Naissance et développement de la cartographie quantitative française au XIXe siècle . Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (CTHS). ISBN 2-7355-0336-3.

(Fig. 85)

Results of sampling from urns shown as symmetrical histograms, with limiting "curve of possibility" (later called the normal curve).

Quetelet, A. (1846). Lettres sur la Théorie des Probabilités, Appliquée aux Sciences Morales et Politiques. Brussels: M. Hayez.

Development of the biplot, a method for visualizing both the observations and variables in a multivariate data set in a single display. Observations are typically represented by points, variables by vectors, such that the position of a point along a vector represents the data value.

Gabriel, K. R. (1971). The biplot graphic display of matrices with application to principal components analysis. Biometrics, 58(3):453-467.

Development of the biplot, a method for visualizing both the observations and variables in a multivariate data set in a single display. Observations are typically represented by points, variables by vectors, such that the position of a point along a vector represents the data value.

Gabriel, K. R. (1971). The biplot graphic display of matrices with application to principal components analysis. Biometrics, 58(3):453-467.

Museum of Social Statistical Graphics and the ISOTYPE system (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Neurath, O. (1973). From Vienna method to Isotype. In M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, pp. 214-248. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel. (papers written 1925-45).

Neurath, O. (1991). Gesammelte Bildpaedagogische Schriften. Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky. ISBN 3209008639. Rudolf Haller and Robin Kinross (eds.).

Analysis and experiments on relations into the Italian Blogosphere





I’ve been invited to join to the blogbabel initiative that aims to map the italian blogosphere. My effort in this interesting project is about to find some new, useful infovis-related solutions to offer some better cognitive tools to approach the Italian blog world and its relations. I started looking around to find interesting solutions about blog-mapping ( from the Manuel Lima’s blogviz, to the BlogoPole French initiative and the first BlogBabel visualization from Ludo).





What seemed to me really interesting is mainly the relations Analysis and not the Graph representation, because it tends to offer a “star-system” style visual environment that requires some more deep work in order to be used to understand how blogs are related each other.





My idea is really simple: suppose you have a line where you can use points to represent Blogs. Above the line I can have arches connecting a source blog (on the left side of the arch) to another (on the right side of the arch). Below the line I can have also arches, but the connection direction is from right to left.





The use of arches and circles come out from “The Shape of Songs” by Martin Wattenberg. In this way we have a LinksOut View (UP) and a LinksIn View (DOWN) and we could use the opacity of each arch to visualize how relations are relevant considering the numeber of links (in/out) among blogs.





The above description was modified from:


http://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/05/10/analisys-and-experiments-on-relation-into-the-italian-blogosphere/




(images may be found at http://flickr.com/photos/danielegaliffa/tags/blogosphere/)

This method is based on the observation that we can easily see the branches, leaves and their arrangement in a botanical tree, despite of the large number of elements. The strand model of Holton is used to convert an abstract tree into a geometric model. Non-leaf nodes are mapped to branches and child nodes to sub-branches. Furthermore, continuing branches are emphasized, long branches are contracted, and sets of leaves are shown as fruit. The method is applied to the visualization of directory structures. The elements, directories and files, as well as their relations can easily be extracted, thereby showing that methods from botanical modeling can be effective for information visualization.

Graphical innovations for exploratory data analysis (stem-and-leaf, graphical lists, box-and-whisker plots, two-way and extended-fit plots, hanging and suspended rootograms).

Tukey, J. W. (1972). Some graphic and semigraphic displays. In T. A. Bancroft (ed.), Statistical Papers in Honor of George W. Snedecor, pp. 293-316. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, August 1969.

As an undergraduate at UC Davis, Patrick Yau had the opportunity to work at the Visualization and Graphics Research Group in the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV). He was under the guidance of Professor Bernd Hamann and Dr. Lars Linsen when he and his colleagues developed the project "Brain Mapping via Hierarchical Isosurface Segmentation Based on Discrete Curvature".

The idea of the project is to look into the surface of two brains and identify the similarities between then. They focused in particular on the curvature of the brains (folds and bumps). Yau worked on data preprocessing and the automated brain mapping algorithm. He wrote a procedure that automatically identifies the front, side and the top for two brains using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and he also wrote a procedure that constructs a topology graph based on the curvature of a brain. The two images shown here reveal different representations of the same brain: as points and as a topology graph.

This is not an actual tessellation since it does not repeat. However, the heavy usage of squares and rectangles is a technique that can create tessellations easily. The coloring technique is also interesting. Mondrian balances the three colors used in this design (the primary colors plus gray) to give balance to the artwork. (Posted by Nicolas Pioch.)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Figure 14 from "Brushing scatterplots" showing interactive labeling of brushed points. An example of interactive statistical graphics allowing brushing, linking, and other forms of interaction.

Becker, R. A. and Cleveland, W. S. (1987). Brushing scatterplots. Technometrics, 29:127-142.

BuddyZoo is a visualization analysis tool that maps AIM buddy lists in order to detect a series of patterns. Here's how it works: Users submit their AIM buddy lists to buddyzoo.com, and then the application runs all kinds of analysis on the data, letting users:

- Find out which buddies they have in common with their friends.
- Measure how popular they are.
- Detect cliques they're part of.
- See a visualization of their Buddy List.
- View their Prestige, computed in a similar manner as Google's PageRank.
- See the degrees of separation between different screen-names.

Invisible Dynamics is a research project sponsored by The Exploratorium which explores the meanings and representations of place. Working across the domains of art, design, cultural geography, cartography, information design, sociology, hydrology, marine sciences, and history, I.D. hosts residencies and workshops, as well as developing exhibitions and public programs. Using new technologies for the representation and analysis of spatial information, I.D. investigates the complexities of the San Francisco Bay Region in the context of the Pacific Rim.

As part of Invisible Dynamics, Stamen Design has been exploring visualizations of GPS data generated by Yellow Cab taxi cabs in San Francisco. In these frame-by-frame maps of the locations of cabs in the Bay Area, the city ebbs and pulses like the beating of a heart in a truly captivating sequence. Both visualizations are part of a video where each frame shows 15 minutes of activity in a dynamic map of taxicabs' speed and position. In the first image, speed is represented by the change in color (White: 0 mph Red: >35 mph), while in the second, larger crosses represent faster taxis.

Cabspotting is a product of San Francisco's Stamen Design, a boutique services firm specializing in data visualization, map making, interactive media, and creative technology reinterpretation. You might remember Stamen from such projects as Mappr or In The News / Vox Delicii.

Catalan Atlas, an exquisitely beautiful visual cosmography, perpetual calendar, and thematic representation of the known world.

First graph of isotherms, showing mean temperature around the world by latitude and longitude. Recognizing that temperature depends more on latitude and altitude, a subscripted graph shows the direct relation of temperature on these two variables.

von Humboldt, A. (1817). Sur les lignes isothermes. Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 5:102-112.

von Humboldt isotherms from Berghaus' 1849 AtlasrnrnFirst graph of isotherms, showing mean temperature around the world by latitude and longitude. Recognizing that temperature depends more on latitude and altitude, a subscripted graph shows the direct relation of temperature on these two variables - Germany

Cartogram, map with shadings from black to white (distribution and intensity of illiteracy in France), the first (unclassed) choropleth map, and perhaps the first modern statistical map. (This cartogram dates from 1826 (Dupin 1827, Plate 1, vol.2) according to Robinson (p.232), rather than 1819 according to Funkhouser).

Dupin, C. (1826). Carte figurative de l'instruction populaire de la France . Jobard. BNF: Ge C 6588 (Funkhouser (1937, p.300) incorrectly dates this as 1819).

Dupin, C. (1827). Forces productives et commerciales de la France. Bachelier.

Robinson, A. H. (1982). Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-72285-6.

Funkhouser, H. G. (Nov. 1937). Historical development of the graphical representation of statistical data. Osiris, 3(1):269-405. Reprinted Brugge, Belgium: St. Catherine Press, 1937.

Bar chart, line graphs of economic data.

Playfair, W. (1786). Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure, and Debts of England, during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century . London: Corry. Re-published in Wainer, H. and Spence, I. (eds.), The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, 2005, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-85554-3.

Physical atlas of the distribution of plants, animals, climate, etc., one of the most extensive and detailed thematic atlases; most of the maps contained tables, graphs, pictorial profiles of distributions over altitude, and other visual accompanyments.

Berghaus, H. (1838). Physikalischer Atlas . Gotha: Justus Perthes. 2 vols., published 1845-48.

There are many difficulties in showing rates of incidence or proportions in maps, when both the areas of geographic regions, and the populations in those regions vary, often inversely. In spatial epidemiology, for example, Standardized Mortality Ratios are often used, expressing the ratios of the number of deaths in each area to those expected on the basis of some externally specified (typically national) age-sex specific rates.

This figure uses a Chi-square metric to depict the distribution of number of cars, O, in each ward in Leicestershire, UK, expressed as a signed chi-square contribution, (Oi - Ei)/ Ö Ei, relative to the expected number, E, per capita. A diverging colour scheme applies hues of red and blue to those areas with higher and lower than expected values with colour saturation showing the magnitude of the variation. Thus whiter zones are close to the expected value and deeper blues and fuller reds show the extremes. This map still confounds area and population with visual impact, which the use of a cartogram base, with circle areas proportional to the population, helps avoid.

Figures from Maps of the Census: A Rough Guide, by Jason Dykes and David Unwin (http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/visual/casestud/dykes/abstra_1.htm).

Abstract:

This Case Study describes the considerations that are needed to produce maps of data from the Census of Population. The `area value' or choropleth map is the standard means of displaying such information on paper. It is a very imperfect visualisation device. First, it is necessary to be careful about the numbers that are mapped and, in particular, never to map absolute numbers. Second, choropleth maps are very sensitive to the mapping zones being used. To produce maps that do not distort the underlying distributions it is necessary to understand how the zones were defined and the effects of their varying sizes on the mapped pattern. Third, there are a series of strictly cartographic considerations related to how these maps are classed and the symbolism used. All of these issues are illustrated using data from the 1991 Population Census for Leicestershire, UK.

These problems lead to a consideration of the need to develop new mapping tools. Dynamic maps can take advantage of an interactive software environment to overcome some of the limitations of the static map. The possibilities which they provide for interactive engagement with data make them appropriate tools for exploratory analysis, or visual thinking. A mapping tool is introduced, which exemplifies this form of map use and examples of the techniques that might be used to visualize the UK Census of Population are provided.

Visualization of vibration patterns (by spreading a uniform layer of sand on a disk, and observing displacement when vibration is applied).

Chladni, E. F. F. (1787). Entdeckungen uber die Theorie des Klanges. Leipzig: Bey Weidmanns Erben und Reich.

As a follow-up job, Moritz Stefaner developed a visual semantic web browser for the project WINDS, an EC-funded project in the 5th Framework, Information Society Technologies programme, Flexible University key action. The main goal of WINDS is to contribute to the reorganisation of the pedagogical, cultural and functional aspects of design education at university.

Stefaner produced this flash demo that allows an incredibly smooth navigation through the content of the CIA Factbook, jumping from country to country with extreme fluidity. For every country one can easily see its neighboring countries, the official languages, water and terrestrial boundaries, and even more detailed info by expanding the country's sphere. The visualized data came from a semi-automatically generated learning object index of the eLearning environment ALE.

A screenshot of a 3D model of the vBNS network which connects universities and laboratories in the USA. The model was created by Jeff Brown, a researcher at MOAT, National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), USA, using his Cichlid data visualisation software. The model is animated to show how traffic flows over the links.




More information on their work can be found in the paper "Network Performance Visualization: Insight Through Animation" by J.A. Brown, McGregor A.J and H-W Braun.

Comprehensive review of all available statistical graphics presented to the Statistical Society of London, classified as figures, maps, and solids (3D), perhaps the first mature attempt at a systematic classification of graphical forms.

Levasseur, É. (1885). La statistique graphique. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 50?:218-250.

Data are often presented in a table or chart whose rows and columns are intrinsically unordered, but which are arranged in an order which conceals patterns, rather than reveal them. The top figure shows a classification of townships (columns) by binary characteristics (rows, presence or absence), both arranged in arbitrary order. Can you see any patterns or trends?

One of Bertin's graphical methods consists simply of permuting the rows and columns to place similar rows and columns together. This gives the bottom figure, where now the trends are clear. See also: Harri Siirtola's The Reorderable Matrix (Java 1.1 Applet, + you need Swing) for an interactive demo. The Jacques Bertin, Semiologie Graphique web site has a nice dynamic display of the reorderable matrix.

[Source: Bertin (1981), Graphics and Graphic Information Processing.]

This small example illustrates dot's feature to draw nodes and edges in clusters or separate rectangular layout regions. Clusters are encoded as subgraphs whose names have the prefix 'cluster'. The color attribute of a cluster is interpreted as its outline color or its background color if its style is 'filled'. Mdiamond and Msquare are modified symbols for data flow diagrams.

2005-08-29: "Color Code" - Interactive Map of the English Language

From InfoVis:Wiki

Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg created Color Code, an astonishing interactive map of 33,000 English nouns:

A picture of 33,000 English nouns, grouped by meaning. Each word is given the average color of web images found when searching for that term.[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

A picture of 33,000 English nouns, grouped by meaning. Each word is given the average color of web images found when searching for that term.

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.

The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

via thedesignweblog

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005] Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg, Color Code: A Color Portrait of the English Language, Retrieved at: August 29, 2005. http://loop.aiga.org/resources/loop/loop9/colorproject/index.html

2005-08-29: "Color Code" - Interactive Map of the English Language

From InfoVis:Wiki

Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg created Color Code, an astonishing interactive map of 33,000 English nouns:

A picture of 33,000 English nouns, grouped by meaning. Each word is given the average color of web images found when searching for that term.[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

A picture of 33,000 English nouns, grouped by meaning. Each word is given the average color of web images found when searching for that term.

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.

The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005]

via thedesignweblog

[Wattenberg and Feinberg, 2005] Martin Wattenberg and Jonathan Feinberg, Color Code: A Color Portrait of the English Language, Retrieved at: August 29, 2005. http://loop.aiga.org/resources/loop/loop9/colorproject/index.html

Diagrams developed to represent color systems. In 1758, Mayer developed a system of constructing and naming many of the possible colours. Lambert extended this with a 3D pyramid indicating "depth" (saturation).

Lambert wanted to extend the coverage of the system to include the concept of depth. He believed that the colour pyramid would be useful to textile merchants to decide if they stocked all the colours, and to dyers and printers as a source of inspiration.

Lambert, J. H. (1772). Beschreibung einer mit dem Calauschen Wachse ausgemalten Farbenpyramide . Berlin: n.p.

Diagrams developed to represent color systems. In 1758, Mayer developed a system of constructing and naming many of the possible colours. Lambert extended this with a 3D pyramid indicating "depth" (saturation).

Mayer, J. T. (1758). De affinitate colorum commentatio , chap. Farbendreieck. n.p. Edited by Lichtenberg, 1775.

A browser visualizing conversations via guest book entries across myspace profiles

We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.

In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

A browser visualizing conversations via guest book entries across myspace profiles

We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.

In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

A browser visualizing conversations via guest book entries across myspace profiles

We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.

In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

A browser visualizing conversations via guest book entries across myspace profiles

We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.

In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

A browser visualizing conversations via guest book entries across myspace profiles

We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations.

In the mySpace service network-only visualization methods are no longer sufficient to meaningfully represent the community structure. Numerous commercial profiles, fake/spam/celebrity profiles and tools such as automated friend adders result in a huge numbers of connections, many of which carry little information about a person’s actual social ties and behavior. The average myspace user has more than 130 friends, but there are also profiles with over a million “friends”. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

Commetrix is a software application to support Community Moderators, Members, and Researchers. The functionality covers four main features: (1) Import of existing virtual communication over the Internet (2) Extraction of underlying electronic communication networks and knowledge communities (3) Visualization of community properties, structures and dynamic behaviour (4) Evaluation of important properties using a qualitative and quantitative measurement system.

Besides all the promising features of Commetrix I must admit I was somehow fascinated with a Commetrix output sample video showing the animated formation of a community over time, quite compelling. To see the video just go to the "Documents/Videos" section.

Identity goes beyond brand: the character of a community is largely determined by its plan. This visualization of 12 new communities around the world seeks to address the question: How is identity expressed in the design of the branded communities appearing in or adjacent to cities around the world?

Area diagram comparing populations of countries to their colonies.

Comprehensive review of all available statistical graphics presented to the Statistical Society of London, classified as figures, maps, and solids (3D), perhaps the first mature attempt at a systematic classification of graphical forms.

Levasseur, É. (1885). La statistique graphique. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 50?:218-250.

Contour map of a 3D table, temperature x hour x month (published in 1845).

Lalanne, L. (1845). Appendice sur la representation graphique des tableaux météorologiques et des lois naturelles en général. In L. F. Kaemtz (ed.), Cours Complet de Météorologie , pp. 1-35. Paulin. Translated and annotated by C. Martins.

Population contour map (population density shown by contours), the first statistical use of a contour map.

Vauthier, L. L. (1874). Note sur une carte statistique figurant la répartition de la population de Paris. Comptes Rendus des Séances de L'Académie des Sciences, 78:264-267. ENPC: 11176 C612.

Contour map.

Buache, P. (1752). Essai de géographie physique. Mémoires de L'Académie Royale des Sciences , pp. 399-416. BNF: Ge.FF-8816-8822.

Grammar of Graphics: A comprehensive systematization of grammatical rules for data and graphs and graph algebras within an object-oriented, computational framework.

Wilkinson, L. (1999). The Grammar of Graphics. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-98774-6.

A (non-authoritative) diagram of heritage of the Unix operating system. This "crazy" version of the classic graph was created to stress test the polygon shape generator and color map manager with random values.

The first comprehensive analysis of data on "moral statistics" (crimes, suicide, literacy, etc.) shown on thematic unclassed choropleth maps; bar charts (of crime, by age groupings and months).

Guerry, A.-M. (1833). Essai sur la statistique morale de la France . Paris: Crochard. ISBN 0-7734-7045-X. English translation: Hugh P. Whitt and Victor W. Reinking, Lewiston, N.Y. : Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.

ATA (Advanced Technology Assessment) is a business intelligence company developing a unique combination of knowledge-bases, software, technological solutions and expertise to support decision-makers in identifying actionable patterns in complex dynamic business environments.

One of ATA's network visualization techniques is called Dynamic Network Rendering. The method supports effective representations of both static structural information and changes over time, which significantly boost understanding of complex relational datasets, and allow analysts to effectively gather competitive technological and organizational intelligence. Representation of time evolution can be addressed from complementary perspectives that can be integrated into unified graph visualization solutions: Static Approach - networks are generated corresponding to "slices" of the original dataset at different points in time; Dynamic Approach - changes to network structure and node relative positions over time are conveyed by motion of graphical elements on the screen.

This graph incorporates ATA's network-based technology and represents a time-sliced view of hypothetical network trajectories of individuals involved in the terrorist attack in Spain, March 2004. (Data from J. A. Rodriguez)

An example map from Luc Girardin's, The Graduate Institute of International Studies, Switzerland, "cyberspace geography visualization" system.

DM Review sponsored a data visualization contest related to data presentation for buisness purposes. One scenario was to create a 'sales dashboard' that highlighted aspects of poor performance for a company. This entry, by Robert Allison of SAS Institute was the winner, and a lovely example of a multi-panel dashboard display for business decision.

It combines a variety of indicators in a coherently organized display: Revenue and profit, performance metrics, product (wine) type, and region, with well-designed color coding and target indicators. One can easily see that while revenue and profit were good and rising, market share was falling, as were delivery time and satisfaction, etc. See Robert's description of the approach and design for this display (http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/allison/scen3_info.htm).

The graph file was generated automatically from a session with the LDBX graphical interface to the standard DBX debugger. Nodes are drawn with the 'record' shape. Labels of this shape are interpreted specially as nested horizontal and vertical box lists formatted as tables. In a record label, curly braces { } enclose lists, vertical bar | separates list items, and creates a port identifier for attaching edges. Edges are also labeled with 'id' attributes. Though not demonstrated in this particular file, these attributes allow referencing multiple (parallel) edges between the same node pair.

Use of a dot map to display epidemiological data, leads to discovery of the source of a cholera epidemic.

Snow, J. (1855). On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. London: (n.p.), 2nd ed.

Gilbert, E. W. (1958). Pioneer maps of health and disease in England. Geographical Journal, 124:172-183.

Delicous Soup shows related del.icio.us tags in a circular graph manner:

Delicious Soup - A tool that reveals your del.icio.us activities...

[Zitvogel, 2005]

via information aesthetics blog

[edit] 3 References

[Ivy, 2005] Ivy, Revealicious, Created at: 2005, Retrieved at: September 15, 2005. http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/ [Zitvogel, 2005] Olivier Zitvogel, Delicous Soup, Created at: 2005, Retrieved at: September 15, 2005. http://www.zitvogel.com/delicioussoup/

Retrieved from "http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=2005-09-15:_%22Revealicious%22_and_%22Delicious_Soup%22_-_two_Flash_based_del.icio.us_visualization_tools"

Delicious Soup is playful visualization tool that maps one's del.icio.us tags in a radial structure. Tags are represented by bouncing bubbles, while edges provide relationships between the tags.

First International Hygiene-Exhibition in Dresden, with 259 graphical-statistical figures of 35 national and international exhibitors and more than 5 million visitors. [Roesle also wrote publications which dealt with the structure of graphical-statistical displays (Roesle, 1913).]

Roesle, E. E. (1911). Sonderkatalog für die Gruppe Statistik der wissenschaftlichen Abteilung der Internationalen Hygiene-Ausstellung . Dresden, Germany: Verlag der Internationelen Hygiene-Ausstellung. (15 colored reproductions of posters from the exhibition).

Roesle, E. E. (1913). Graphische-statistische darstellungen, ihre technik, methodik und wissenschaftliche bedeutung. Archiv für soziale Hygiene, 8 :369-406.

Ostermann, R. (2001). Emil Eugen Roesle - grafikpionier im bereich der medizinstatistik und epidemiologie. Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie in Medizin und Biologie, 244.

Normal correlation surface and regression, the idea that in a bivariate normal distribution, contours of equal frequency formed concentric ellipses, with the regression line connecting points of vertical tangents.

Galton, F. (1886). Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 15:246-263.

Invention of the pie chart, and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.

Playfair, W. (1801). Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe . London: Wallis. Re-published in Wainer, H. and Spence, I. (eds.), The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, 2005, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-85554-3.

Circular glyphs, with rays to represent multivariate data.

Anderson, E. (1957). A semigraphical method for the analysis of complex problems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 13(3):923-927. Reprinted in Technometrics, 2:387-391 (August 1960).

Interactive graphics for multiple time series with direct manipulation (zoom, rescale, overlaying, etc.).

Unwin, A. R. and Wills, G. (1988). Eyeballing time series. In Proceedings of the 1988 ASA Statistical Computing Section, pp. 263-268. American Statistical Association.

This graph shows a scatterplot of data from a survey of Chilean voters held six months before the plebicite held in September 1988 on the future of the military government of Augusto Pinochet. The ordinate, "Voting Intention" is a binary variable, 0 = No = Return to Civilian government, 1 = Yes = Continue Military rule. The abscissa reflects a scale of Support for the Status Quo.

The graph shows the binary observations at the top and bottom of the display, jittered vertically to avoid overplotting. The solid line is a linear regression; the solid curve is a logistic regression. A non-parametric (lowess) curve is shown by the broken line. Although there is no data in the middle of the graph, the visual elements combine to show how the propensity to vote Yes increases steadily with Support for the status quo.

Discrete, categorical data presents difficult challenges for graphical display. It is hard to show the data, because many points coincide.

Figure from John Fox's Applied Regression Analysis, Linear Models, and Related Methods, Figure 15.1.

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

This image shows a DocuBurst graph rooted at "atmospheric phenomenon". Node opacity is directly related to the occurrences of related terms in the target text. The graph structure is the WordNet hyponymy tree. Gold coloured nodes are search results for words that start with "w". Blue nodes trace the path from the node under the mouse ("light") to the graph's root.

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

This image shows the occurrences of "idea" words in a general science textbook. The opacity of the node fill colour corresponds to the strength of occurrence of related terms in the target text. The graph structure is the WordNet hyponymy graph, rooted at "idea", and the gold coloured nodes match a search query for words starting with "pl".

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

In this DocuBurst graph, occurrences of words in the document of interest (a science textbook) is indicated by increased opacity of the corresponding graph node. The graph structure is the WordNet hyponymy tree. Here, we can see that "kind" and "quantity" occur more often than "feature" and "idea", while "concept" does not occur at all.

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

This image shows the DocuBurst interface. A note in the main graph is selected, and all occurrences of words corresponding to that node are highlighted in orange in the document browser on the right. The bottom panel highlights occurrences of the selected words in the original text.

DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents.

The subtree rooted at "radiation" is "rolled up" using the mouse wheel, to allow other nodes to expand their angular extent.

DOLBY is an interactive application for the visualization of the subject catalog of INCOM. INCOM is the Internet-based communication platform of the Interface Design Department of Potsdam's University of Applied Sciences. INCOM's goal is to improve internal communication among students and faculty as a community informational aggregator of projects, articles, seminars and events. INCOM is developed and produced by students and coworkers of the Interface Design Department, under the direction of Professor Boris Mueller.

DOLBY maps INCOM's existing key words on a clockwise radial structure, organized alphabetically by small circles. In addition all contributions are represented by rectangles shown in an encircled radius. One can easily rollover a keyword to see which articles relate to it, or mouse over an article and discover the array of associated keywords, and the title and author of the contribution. If an article or specific keyword is clicked, the selection centers itself being immediately surrounded by its related articles/keywords in an ever-morphing constellation. DOLBY visualizes both qualitative and quantitative relationships of the subject catalog of INCOM, and through its visualization it answers questions not fully solved on the INCOM platform.

First simple dot map of population by department, 1 dot = 10,000 people.

Frère de Montizon, A. J. (1830). Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France. BNF.

Robinson, A. H. (1982). Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-72285-6.

First topographical map.

du Carla-Boniface, M. (1782). Expression des nivellements; ou, méthode nouvelle pour marquer sur les cartes terrestres et marines les hauteurs et les configurations du terrain. In François de Dainville, ``From the Depths to the Heights,'' translated by Arthur H. Robinson, Surveying and Mapping, 1970, 30:389-403, on page 396.

The centroid of a polygon is simply the center of balance for the polygon. In regular polygons, the centroid is the same distance from all vertices and is also the same distance from all sides.

We can create a new tessellation from an existing one by joining the centroids of adjacent polygons. The polygons that are made from all of these joinings is called the dual of the original tessellation.

This is the demiregular tessellation 3.3.4.3.4 / 3.3.4.12 / 3.4.3.12.

The centroid of a polygon is simply the center of balance for the polygon. In regular polygons, the centroid is the same distance from all vertices and is also the same distance from all sides.

We can create a new tessellation from an existing one by joining the centroids of adjacent polygons. The polygons that are made from all of these joinings is called the dual of the original tessellation.

This is the demiregular tessellation 3.3.4.3.4 / 3.3.4.12 / 3.4.3.12; it is the dual with the original tessellation removed.

The centroid of a polygon is simply the center of balance for the polygon. In regular polygons, the centroid is the same distance from all vertices and is also the same distance from all sides.

We can create a new tessellation from an existing one by joining the centroids of adjacent polygons. The polygons that are made from all of these joinings is called the dual of the original tessellation.

This is the demiregular tessellation 3.3.4.3.4 / 3.3.4.12 / 3.4.3.12 with centroids of adjacent polygons connected; the original tessellation is shown in gray.

"Carte chronologique": An annotated time line of history (from Creation) on a 54-foot scroll, including names and descriptive events, grouped thematically, with symbols denoting character (martyr, tyrant, heretic, noble, upright, etc.) and profession (painter, theologian, musician, monk, etc.).

Ferguson, S. (1991). The 1753 carte chronographique of Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg. Princeton University Library Chronicle, 52:190-230.

Wainer, H. (1998). The graphical inventions of Dubourg and Ferguson: Two precursors to William Playfair. Chance, 11(4):39-41.

These images are part of a paper presented at InfoVis'05, which describes a novel technique to visualize graphs with extended node and link labels. The lengths of these labels range from a short phrase to a full sentence to an entire paragraph and beyond. The proposed solution is different from existing approaches that rely on intensive computational effort to optimize the label placement problem. Instead, the authors share the visualization resources with the graph and present the label information in static, interactive, and dynamic modes without the requirement for tackling the intractability issues. This allows the reallocation of the computational resources for dynamic presentation of real-time information. The paper also includes a user study to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this visualization technique.

ATA (Advanced Technology Assessment) is a business intelligence company developing a unique combination of knowledge-bases, software, technological solutions and expertise to support decision-makers in identifying actionable patterns in complex dynamic business environments.

ATA's DyNet is an innovative knowledge visualization tool which enables rapid domain analysis. Data are mined from corporate databases and public data sources. Relationships between concepts and entities (i.e. firms, patents, publications) are identified using citations, descriptive terms, or textual similarities. Linkages among thousands of concepts and entities are then represented as an evolving network in time. The software includes a variety of features which allow exploration, mapping and manipulation of knowledge networks, and which give detail-on-demand, enabling rapid and powerful multi-level analysis of complex, attribute-rich data.

Initial development of geographic information systems, combining spatially-referenced data, spatial models and map-based visualization. Example: Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics (and Spatial Analysis) develops SYMAP, producing isoline, choropleth and proximal maps on a line printer.

Chrisman, N. (1988). The risks of software innovation: A case study of the harvard lab. The American Cartographer, 15(3):291-300.

Tomlinson, R. and Petchenik, B. (eds.) (1988). Reflections on a Revolution: The Transition from Analogue to Digital Representations of Space, 1958-1988, vol. 15 (3). The American Cartographer. (Special issue).

First International Hygiene-Exhibition in Dresden, with 259 graphical-statistical figures of 35 national and international exhibitors and more than 5 million visitors. [Roesle also wrote publications which dealt with the structure of graphical-statistical displays (Roesle, 1913).]

Roesle, E. E. (1911). Sonderkatalog für die Gruppe Statistik der wissenschaftlichen Abteilung der Internationalen Hygiene-Ausstellung . Dresden, Germany: Verlag der Internationelen Hygiene-Ausstellung. (15 colored reproductions of posters from the exhibition).

Roesle, E. E. (1913). Graphische-statistische darstellungen, ihre technik, methodik und wissenschaftliche bedeutung. Archiv für soziale Hygiene , 8 :369-406.

Ostermann, R. (2001). Emil Eugen Roesle - grafikpionier im bereich der medizinstatistik und epidemiologie. Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie in Medizin und Biologie, 244.

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:

2005-08-24: Integrating graphs into Treemaps

From InfoVis:Wiki

Lab Escape has integrated time-series graphs into their Treemap application Enterprise Tree Map 2.0

Demo of Enterprise Tree Map 2.0 showing stock market data. Time-series graphs of individual stocks are integrated into the Treemap[Lab Escape, 2005]

Demo of Enterprise Tree Map 2.0 showing stock market data. Time-series graphs of individual stocks are integrated into the Treemap

[Lab Escape, 2005]

via information aesthetics blog

[Lab Escape, 2005] Lab Escape, Screenshot of Enterprise Tree Map 2.0 Demo, Retrieved at: 2005-08-24, http://labescape.com/products/treemap/index.html

Layouts made with neato have the property that all edges tend to have about the same length (unless there is a manual adjustment). By default neato uses randomization, so it makes a different layout each time, but this particular example almost always look well. Edge labels are placed at the edge's midpoint.

Ethnographic maps showing distribution of ethnic groups throughout the world.

Johnston, A. K. (1843). The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial, and Political Geography. London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Prichard, J. C. (1843). Researches Into the Physical History of Man. London: Houlston & Stoneman.

Ethnographic maps showing distribution of ethnic groups throughout the world.

Johnston, A. K. (1843). The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial, and Political Geography. London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Prichard, J. C. (1843). Researches Into the Physical History of Man. London: Houlston & Stoneman.

Experimental test of statistical graphical forms (pie vs. subdivided bar charts).

Eells, W. C. (1926). The relative merits of circles and bars for representing component parts. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 21:119-132.

This project attempts to take the first steps toward an exploratory data environment for e-mail corpora, using the Enron e-mail corpus as a motivating data set. The interface--currently named "enronic"--unifies information visualization techniques with various algorithms for processing the e-mail corpus, including social network inference, message categorization, and community analysis. Though still a preliminary design, enronic shows promise as a platform for more tightly coupling manual and automated data analysis.

The graph on the left shows the resulting social network visualization. People are drawn as nodes with labels containing either their name or their e-mail address, depending on what was present in the database. Edges represent the histories of ALL e-mail traffic between two people. Pie graphs are placed in the center of each edge, conveying an overall picture of how the e-mail traffic represented by that edge has been categorized.

Cartoons of human face to represent multivariate data.

Chernoff, H. (1973). The use of faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 68:361-368.

An increasing number of scientific publications begin to contain graphs and diagrams which describe, but do not analyze, natural phenomena (magnetic variation, weather, tides, etc.).

Network graph visualization of Facebook contacts using data retrieved using Give Me My Data http://givememydata.com and Nodebox 1.0.

Network graph visualization of Facebook contacts using data retrieved using Give Me My Data http://givememydata.com and Nodebox 1.0.

Network graph visualization of Facebook contacts and mutual contacts using data retrieved using Give Me My Data http://givememydata.com and Nodebox 1.0.

Network graph visualization of Facebook contacts and mutual contacts using data retrieved using Give Me My Data http://givememydata.com and Nodebox 1.0.

This is a drawing of a finite automaton. The rankdir and orientation request a left-to-right drawing in landscape mode. Note the use of text labels on edges.

Fisheye view: an idea to provide focus and greater detail in areas of interest of a large amount of information, while retaining the surrounding context in much less detail.

Furnas, G. W. (1981). The Fisheye View: A New Look at Structured Files. Tech. Rep. Technical Memorandum 81-11221-9, Bell Labs.

Flow Map Layout is a novel visualization technique seen as a hybrid of graphs and flow maps. Cartographers have long used flow maps to show the movement of objects from one location to another, such as the number of people in a migration, the amount of goods being traded, or the number of packets in a network. One of the most famous flow maps, depicting Napoleon's Russian Campaign, was created by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869, and can be seen here. The advantage of flow maps is that they reduce visual clutter by merging edges. Most flow maps are drawn by hand and there are few computer algorithms available. In Flow Map Layout, the authors present a method for generating flow maps using hierarchical clustering given a set of nodes, positions, and flow data between the nodes. The technique is inspired by graph layout algorithms that minimize edge crossings and distort node positions, while maintaining their relative position to one another. The authors have demonstrated the technique by producing flow maps for network traffic, census data, and trade data.

The first image illustrates a close-up of top 15 imports to Spain and France. Notice the branching structure is shared across different nodes, for example Spain, and France branch to the Netherlands, Germany and the UK in the same way.

The second image represents an outgoing migration map from Colorado (USA) from 1995-2000, generated by the algorithm without layout adjustment or edge routing.

First published flow maps, showing transportation by means of shaded lines, widths proportional to amount (passengers).

Harness, H. D. (1838). Atlas to Accompany the Second Report of the Railway Commissioners, Ireland . Dublin: H.M.S.O. (a) Map showing the relative number of passengers in different directions by regular public conveyances, 80 x 64 cm; (b) map showing the relative quantities of traffic in different directions, 80 x 64 cm; (c) map showing by varieties of shading the comparative density of the population, 80 x 64 cm.

Robinson, A. H. (1955). The 1837 maps of Henry Drury Harness. Geographical Journal, 121:440-450.

Robinson, A. H. (1982). Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-72285-6.

flowerGarden is an web-based software application, produced in Flash, for real-time social network and conversation visualization. It was used at the 3-day Bodies in Play summit in Banff, May 2005, at which the 50 participants were invited to input information about who they spoke to and what they discussed during the duration of the event. The visualization was projected on a large screen in the main summit venue to reflect the current state of the social network and discussion space of the summit.

Each participant, upon entering information into a form, is visually represented by a flower, with a petal growing on the flower in real-time as a new conversation is entered. The flowers of individuals who have conversed with one another are connected by green vines, and the closer two flowers are distanced from each other the more those people have spoken. The concepts discussed between all participants are laid out in the background according to their frequency of use. By rolling over flowers, petals, and words, different perspectives of the information can be seen.

Comprehensive review of all available statistical graphics presented to the Statistical Society of London, classified as figures, maps, and solids (3D), perhaps the first mature attempt at a systematic classification of graphical forms.

Levasseur, É. (1885). La statistique graphique. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 50?:218-250.

"Four-Fold Circular Display" to represent 2x2 table.

Fienberg, S. E. (1975). Perspective Canada As a Social Report. Tech. rep., Department of Applied Statistics, University of Minnesota. Unpublished paper.

Ogive or cumulative frequency curve, inhabitants of Paris by age groupings (shows the number of inhabitants of Paris per 10,000 in 1817 who were of a given age or over. The name "ogive" is due to Galton.).

Fourier, J. B. J. (1821). Notions generales, sur la population. Recherches Statistiques sur la Ville de Paris et le Departement de la Seine, 1:1-70.

Physical atlas of the distribution of plants, animals, climate, etc., one of the most extensive and detailed thematic atlases; most of the maps contained tables, graphs, pictorial profiles of distributions over altitude, and other visual accompaniments.

Berghaus, H. (1838). Physikalischer Atlas. Gotha: Justus Perthes. 2 vols., published 1845-48.

Recording of motion (of a running horse) by means of a set of glass-plate cameras, triggered by strings.

Galton's first semi-graphic scatterplot and correlation diagram, of head size and height, from his notebook on Special Peculiarities.

Hilts, V. L. (1975). A Guide to Francis Galton's English Men of Science, vol.65. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society.

Appropriate use of color for data display allows interrelationships and patterns within data to be easily observed. The careless use of color will obscure these patterns. When color is used 'appropriately,' the organization of the perceptual dimensions of color corresponds to the logical ordering in the data. Brewer develops a color scheme typology which matches the ways in which data are organized with corresponding organizations of hue and lightness.

Four types of color schemes are represented. The image also illustrates how they can be used in combination for two-variable maps or visulizations.

* diverging-- when the coloring variable has a meaningful midpoint (e.g., 0)

* sequential-- for a continuously increasing series of values

* qualitative-- when the coloring variable is categorical

* binary-- for a two-level categorical coloring variable.

Figure from Cynthia Brewer, Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization (http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/c/a/cab38/ColorSch/SchHome.html).

Cynthia A. Brewer, 1994, "Color Use Guidelines for Mapping and Visualization," Chapter 7 (pp. 123-147) in Visualization in Modern Cartography, edited by A.M. MacEachren and D.R.F. Taylor, Elsevier Science, Tarrytown, NY.

Cynthia A. Brewer, 1994, "Guidelines for Use of the Perceptual Dimensions of Color for Mapping and Visualization," Color Hard Copy and Graphic Arts III, edited by J. Bares, Proceedings of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), San Jose, February 1994, Vol. 2171, pp. 54-63.

See also, Brewer's online color scheme picker, appropriately called "ColorBrewer," (http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorBrewer/ColorBrewer_intro.html) and my Color Picker Page (http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/colorpick.html).

Understanding the results of genetic programming can be a daunting task. Are the trees being generated correctly? Are recombination and mutation happening as desired? Which branches are more stable than others - where is the evolution taking place?rnrnGenetic Programming TreeVisualizer is a free, open source function tree rendering and visualization Java code that can quickly answer some of these questions. It allows seeing what a tree looks like from one generation to the next. One could view the best individual per generation in a sequence of images to see how evolution is affecting the population. This heuristic feel for what is going on could provide valuable insight and inspiration for any Genetic Programming experiment.

This screenshot shows a selected news abstract set in geographical context.

GMT Description

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, rnorganizations and current as well as past professional connections between people.

Key features include:

This screenshot shows the relationships among individuals as a human organizational network diagram.

GMT Description

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, rnorganizations and current as well as past professional connections between people.

Key features include:

This screenshot shows census data for a selected congressional district.

GMT Description

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, rnorganizations and current as well as past professional connections between people.

Key features include:

Presented at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis 2004), Geotime by Thomas Kapler and William Wright is a project financed by NGA (National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency) and it aims to analyze observations over Time and Geography, which is always a particular hard task to achieve. This project is one of the best I've seen in dealing with the overlapping of these two realms. A working application of GeoTime is not available online, but for those who had the opportunity of seeing it working live, it proved to be a quite interesting interactive technique.

A visualization method was needed to improve perception of movements, events and relationships as they change over time within a spatial context. A combined temporal-spatial space was constructed in which to show interconnecting streams of events over a range of time in a single picture. Put simply, events are represented within an X,Y,T coordinate space, in which the X,Y plane shows geographic space and the Z-axis represents time into the future and past. In addition to providing the spatial context, the ground plane marks the instant of focus between before and after - events along the timeline "occur" when they meet the surface. Events are arrayed in time along time tracks, which are located wherever events occur within the spatial plane.

Tamara Munzner and colleagues are visualising the global topology of the MBone using 3D global geographic models:

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/mbone/

[For more information on the MBone maps see the Map of the Month article "Internet Arcs Around the Globe" in Mappa.Mundi Magazine.]

Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 85-92, October 28-29 1996, San Francisco, CA, 1996.

Tamara Munzner and colleagues are visualising the global topology of the MBone using 3D global geographic models:

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/mbone/

[For more information on the MBone maps see the Map of the Month article "Internet Arcs Around the Globe" in Mappa.Mundi Magazine.]

Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 85-92, October 28-29 1996, San Francisco, CA, 1996.

Tamara Munzner and colleagues are visualising the global topology of the MBone using 3D global geographic models:

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/mbone/

[For more information on the MBone maps see the Map of the Month article "Internet Arcs Around the Globe" in Mappa.Mundi Magazine.]

Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 85-92, October 28-29 1996, San Francisco, CA, 1996.

Google Cartography uses the Google Search API to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area. It is indeed a very innovative and appealing concept, particularly since its interactive functionality allows a deeper understanding of the vast mesh of intersections that form a city's street network.

This application takes a starting street and finds streets that intersect with it. Traversing the streets in a breadth-first manner, further intersections are discovered. Eventually a connected graph is produced showing the interconnectivity of streets flowing from the starting street.

The largest connected subgraph is visualized using a Radial Layout algorithm provided by the Prefuse graph visualization framework. The graph is initially centered on the start street but will automatically adjust its focus to center around the most recently selected street.

On the provided URL you can try navigating through the streets of New York or Melbourne, or in case you have a Google key, you can explore your own area.

2006-03-27: Google Finance - Interactive Flash graphs to explore stock price data

From InfoVis:Wiki

Google Finance - Interactive Flash graphs to explore stock price data

[Google, 2006]

Interactive Flash graphs that combine stock price data in form of Line graphs (top) and sold volumes via Spike graphs (bottom). The data can be explored interactively providing Details on demand for each day; navigation can be performed via dragging the chart by mouse or moving the top Overview-plus-Detail slider. The current level of detail can be determined by dragging the overview window or selecting predefined granularities. Furthermore, company news are related to time by placing flags along the price chart.

Details: http://finance.google.com

via information aesthetics blog

[Google, 2006] Google, Finance BETA, Retrieved at: March 27, 2006. http://finance.google.com

First inclusion of grand tours in an interactive system that also has linked brushing, linked identification, visual inference from graphics, interactive scaling of plots, etc.

From 1991 to 1996, there was a spate of development and public distribution of highly interactive systems for data analysis and visualization, e.g., XGobi, ViSta by Deborah Swayne, Di Cook, Andreas Buja, and Forrest Young (1940-2006).

Buja, A., Asimov, D., Hurley, C., and McDonald, J. A. (1988). Elements of a viewing pipeline for data analysis. In William S. Cleveland and M. E. McGill (eds.), Dynamic Graphics for Statistics. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Swayne, D. F., Cook, D., and Buja, A. (1992). XGobi: Interactive dynamic graphics in the X Window System with a link to S. In Proceedings of the 1991 American Statistical Association Meetings, pp. ??-?? American Statistical Association.

Buja, A., Cook, D., and Swayne, D. F. (1996). Interactive high-dimensional data visualization. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics , 5 (1):78-99.

Swayne, D. F., Cook, D., and Buja, A. (1998). XGobi: Interactive dynamic data visualization in the X Window System. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 7(1):113-130.

Young, F. W. (1994). ViSta: The Visual Statistics System . Tech. Rep. RM 94-1, L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory, UNC.

Bivariate plot of a theoretical curve derived from observations (barometric pressure vs. altitude), graphical analysis based on empirical data.

Halley, E. (1686). On the height of the mercury in the barometer at different elevations above the surface of the earth, and on the rising and falling of the mercury on the change of weather. Philosophical Transactions , 16 :104-115.

Graph of the beta density.

In 2004 a book was published by the Interaction Design Institute of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Zirich, on the subject of "the interaction" and its place in the world of man-machine-communications. The book, Total Interaction, is a compilation of nineteen essays which offer different perspectives on this complex thematic field.

In order to help the reader understand not only the content of each individual essay, but also the thematic links relating the essays to each other, Magnus Rembold and Jurgen Spath created a visualization piece that illustrates the book's content.

The concentric circles represent the individual essays, with the radius in direct proportion to the essay's character count. A word's frequency is proportional to both its type size and the diameter of its circle. In addition, the essays are depicted as a pie slice that has been color-coded and whose width of the central angle derives from the number of coinciding words between the essay in question and that of the secondary author. The radius of the pie slice also derives from the length of the individual essays (the same is true of the concentric circles). The barcode structure which appears within the concentric circle of the essay in question breaks down its structure, and both the central angle and transparency of each bar correspond to the length of the essay's paragraphs.

The GraphNews project (beta released) has been developed as a new visualization and browsing feature of the Libero WebNews service, part of the Libero portal, one of the major Italian Internet Service providers. Libero WebNews, developed from Arianna Team, allows a fast visualization of the news published on the Web from more than 1.100 journalistic sources online.

GraphNews analyzes the content of the news articles processed in Libero WebNews, with the goal of highlighting the main subjects, i.e. the people, the products, the localities, the societies, the institutions, etc., and extracts the relations that elapse between them. The final result of this elaboration is a graph visualization of these subjects and their relations.

The graph is browsable through a simple one click:
- If one clicks a node (ellipse box), GraphNews creates a new graph with subject and relations tied to that specific node.
- If one clicks an arc (square box), GraphNews returns all the news that speak about the two subjects joined from the arc.

GraphNews also allows the change of detail level and the time period (day, week, month) of the graph. In the cases shown here, the inputted word for the first image was "Apple", while on the second was "Google".

GUESS is an exploratory data analysis and visualization tool for graphs and networks. The system contains a domain-specific embedded language called Gython (an extension of Python, or more specifically Jython) which supports the operators and syntactic sugar necessary for working on graph structures in an intuitive manner. An interactive interpreter binds the text that one types in the interpreter to the objects being visualized for more useful integration. GUESS also offers a visualization front end that supports the export of static images and dynamic movies.

Because GUESS is Jython/Java based one can also construct their own applications and applets without much coding. GUESS is distributed as GPL and makes use of a number of other open source packages and contributions.

Invention of a mechanical device, containing a logarithmic scale of equal parts and trigonomic functions which, with the aid of a pair of calipers, could be used as a slide rule. This device, called "Gunter's scale", or the "gunter" by seamen, was soon replaced by a true slide rule, containing two parallel logarithmic scales.

Babcock, B. E. (1994). Some notes on the history and use of Gunter's scale. Journal of the Oughtred Society , 3 :14-20.

Gunter, E. (1624). Description and use of the sector, the crosse-staffe and other instruments.

First known weather map, showing prevailing winds on a geographical map of the Earth.

Halley, E. (1686). On the height of the mercury in the barometer at different elevations above the surface of the earth, and on the rising and falling of the mercury on the change of weather. Philosophical Transactions , 16 :104-115.

Beginnings of EDA: improvements on histogram in analysis of counts, tail values (hanging rootogram).

Tukey, J. W. (1965). The future of processes of data analysis. In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on the Design of Experiment in Army Research Development and Testing, pp. 691-729. Durham, NC: U.S. Army Research Office. ARO-D Report 65-3.

Harmlog Sitemap is a visualization model, developed by Harm van den Dorpel, with the intent of mapping the contents of a blog (which is linear in time). Harm tagged different categories, which rotate in a three-dimensional space, and can easily expand by clicking on them. The project brings a fresh approach to this sort of visualizations, in particular for its fluid, almost organic structure.

(Flash Player is required)

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a log-log plot of luminosity as a function of temperature for stars, used to explain the changes as a star evolves. It provided an entirely new way to look at stars, and laid the groundwork for modern stellar physics and evolution, developed independently by Elnar Hertzsprung (1873-1967), Denmark [127] and Henry Norris Russell (1877-1957), USA. See (Spence, below) for a recent appraisal.

Hertzsprung, E. (1911). Publikationen des astrophysikalischen observatorium zu Potsdam. Num. 63.

Spence, I. and Garrison, R. F. (1993). A remarkable scatterplot. The American Statistician, 47 (1):12-19.

How can you show the details of a history visually? Time provides one obvious dimension. What else can you show to tell the story? Most timeline charts use a 2D representation, time x {place or theme}. Some are more successful in integrating additional dimensions.

This image, from the Library of Congress, Visual Memory Project, History of the Civil War in the United States, 1860-1865 shows the progress of the war, with a time scale in months, and principal battles, troop movements, etc, using "Scaife's comparative and synoptical system of history applied to all countries." A reproduction may be purchased from the Kroll Map Company

See the timelines page (http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/timelines.html) for more on timelines.

2005-07-21: "In The News" - Interactive Visualization of Google News

From InfoVis:Wiki

Apart from the well known Newsmap visualization that utilizes Treemaps to present the current distribution of Google News topics, another very interesting visualization exists: In The News is the title of Michal Migurski's interactive Flash application that was posted already a year ago:

http://news.stamen.com/

In contrast to Newsmap that only shows current news, In The News adds temporal aspects via presenting the history of news topics over time. Thus, it allows for interactive exploration of the development of news topics over time.

In The News (Google News visualization)

[Migurski, 2004] Michal Migurski, In The News. Created at: June 9, 2004. Retrieved at: July 21, 2005. http://news.stamen.com/

* One week worth of news is represented in rows on the display.

* A single news topic is represented as color chip whereas the size of a chip denotes its relative importance on that day.

* Color is used to show whether an item has gained or lost importance relative to the previous day.

* When selecting a news topic, the corresponding color chips are highlighted and a small bar graph showing the topic's performance over the last month is shown below the main visualization.

* If a new topic is selected, another small bar graph is added while keeping the history of the last five selected topics visible and allowing for their comparison.

* Furthermore, news topics can be searched and lists of Top Names, Top Gainers, and Top Losers are provided.

The different views are very well coordinated and smooth transitions are provided, which adds to the coherent picture of the whole application making it an excellent example for a highly interactive exploration tool for time-oriented abstract data. And even nicer, the source code is available and released under a Creative Commons License.

via sendung.de blog

[Migurski, 2004] Michal Migurski, In The News. Created at: June 9, 2004. Retrieved at: July 21, 2005. http://news.stamen.com/

Spate of articles on experimental tests of statistical graphical forms: R. von Huhn, F. E. Croxton, J. N. Washburne, USA.

Washburne, J. N. (1927). An experimental study of various graphic, tabular and textual methods of presenting quantitative material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 18:361-376, 465-476.

von Huhn, R. (1927). A discussion of the Eells' experiment. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:31-36.

Croxton, F. E. (1927). Further studies in the graphic use of circles and bars. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:36-39.

Croxton, F. E. and Stein, H. (1932). Graphic comparisons by bars, squares, circles and cubes. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 27:54-60.

Croxton, F. E. and Stryker, R. E. (1927). Bar charts versus circle diagrams. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:473-482.

This research demonstrates how principles of self-organization and behavior simulation can be used to represent dynamic data evolutions by extending the concept of information flocking, originally introduced by Proctor & Winter, to time-varying datasets. A rule-based behavior system continuously controls and updates the dynamic actions of individual, three-dimensional elements that represent the changing data values of reoccurring data objects. As a result, different distinguishable motion types emerge that are driven by local interactions between the spatial elements as well as the evolution of time-varying data values. Notably, this representation technique focuses on the representation of dynamic data alteration characteristics, or how reoccurring data objects change over time, instead of depicting the exact data values themselves. In addition, it demonstrates the potential of motion as a useful information visualization cue.

The modern weather map, a chart showing area of similar air pressure and barometric changes by means of glyphs displayed on a map. These led to the discovery of the anti-cyclonic movement of wind around low-pressure areas.

Categorical data are often shown as tables of frequencies, cross-classified by two or more discrete variables. Interactive mosaic plots can display complex multivariate relationships surprisingly clearly. Interaction is essential to query the displays (because axis descriptions become messy in several dimensions) and to reorder the displays to emphasise different features.

This plot, from the Augsburg MANET software, shows survival rates by gender, age and class from the Titanic disaster. The left lower section shows how female adult survival rates declined with class and the right lower section reveals that the pattern of male rates was different. Reordering by class, age and gender would highlight the comparison of male and female rates by class and the poor survival rate of children in the third class. [Thanks to Antony Unwin for this contribution.]

This is the graph of an intranet. The edge length adjustment in the last line is an attempt to improve the placement of two nodes that otherwise wind up too close. Notice the way of using subgraphs to create a fully-connected subgraph between the nodes IHP, IW, IH1, IH2, and IH4.

IP-III is a visualization application for mapping the online user presence in the Internet. The basic idea is to create a space typical to the Internet, which does not refer to the usual geographic information of online users (compare traffic visualization tools), but rather derives directly from the Internet specific code of the IP numbers.If the binary code of the IP addresses is transposed into spatial coordinates, a space constructing structure can be produced, which corresponds to a spatial language inherent to the Internet.

Through the online user's applications as spatial coordinates, the created space modifies itself in real-time with the behavior of its visitors. An important aspect of the code conversion of the IP addresses into spatial coordinates is that the spatial interpretation of the IP addresses is not geographically translated in a classical sense, but rather the IP addresses are broken down into their binary code and, following this, allocated to a Cartesian coordinate system. With this, a virtual map is generated in which an autogenous net space is described - quasi a spatial map of the virtual Internet space.

The installable net project 'IP-III' is comprised of two parts: In the 'online part' which is immediately defined for the online user as a website and in an 'installable part' of the exhibition. The sum of both parts produces a superposition of virtual and real space.

Contour maps showing curves of equal value (an isogonic map, lines of equal magnetic declination for the world, possibly the first contour map of a data-based variable).

Halley, E. (1701). The description and uses of a new, and correct sea-chart of the whole world, shewing variations of the compass. London.

Thrower, N. J. W. (ed.) (1981). The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the Paramore 1698 - 1701 . London: Hakluyt Society. ISBN 0 904 180 02. 2nd series, vol 156-157 (2 vols).

Museum of Social Statistical Graphics and the ISOTYPE system (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Neurath, O. (1973). From Vienna method to Isotype. In M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, pp. 214-248. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel. (papers written 1925-45).

Neurath, O. (1991). Gesammelte Bildpaedagogische Schriften. Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky. ISBN 3209008639. Rudolf Haller and Robin Kinross (eds.).

2005-11-29: Jellyfish - visualization of an art encyclopedia (developed using processing.org)

From InfoVis:Wiki

Jellyfish visualizes an encyclopedia of the arts.

[Horn and Jenett, 2005]

Jellyfish visualizes an encyclopedia of the arts.

The project should be seen as an experiment, which deals with a dynamic interface. The purpose was to remove a static, conventional design and to achieve a playful interface.

The application is developed in Processing and uses an XML-database to update content.

[Horn and Jenett, 2005]

Homepage: http://www.carohorn.de/jellyfish/index.htm

[Horn and Jenett, 2005] Carolin Horn and Florian Jenett, Jellyfish - an encyclopedia of the arts, Created at: 2005, Retrieved at: November 29, 2005. http://www.carohorn.de/jellyfish/index.htm

The link pictured here is an infinitely complex link consisting of an infinite number of unknots. Each unknot has five-fold symmetry about its centre.

The oldest known map? (There are several claimants for this honor.)- unknown, Museum at Konya, Turkey.

Museum of Social Statistical Graphics and the ISOTYPE system (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Neurath, O. (1973). From Vienna method to Isotype. In M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, pp. 214-248. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel. (papers written 1925-45).

Neurath, O. (1991). Gesammelte Bildpaedagogische Schriften. Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky. ISBN 3209008639. Rudolf Haller and Robin Kinross (eds.).

Combination of many variables into multi-function nomograms, using 3D, juxtaposition of maps, parallel coordinate and hexagonal grids (L'Abaque Triomphe).

Lallemand, C. (1885). Les abaques héxagonaux: Nouvelle méthode générale de calcul graphique, avec de nombreux exemples d'application. Paris: Ministère des travaux publics, Comité du nivellement général de la France.

Not all thematic maps have to have a serious purpose. Cartes gastronomiques were quite common in the early 20th century and many fine examples are held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I found these examples in a brochure distributed by Coté France on the Autoroute du Sud. Now, what's the shortest distance between a Cantal and a pain de mie?

Further described in:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/94-gastronomic-cartography-the-france-of-breads/

Logarithmic grid (the first log-log plot, as a nomogram for showing products from the factors).

Lalanne, L. (1846). Mémoire sur les tables graphiques et sur la géométrie anamorphique appliquées a diverses questions qui se rattachent a l'art de l'ingénieur. Annales des Ponts et Chausées, 2e series, 11:1-69. Read 1843.

This image is a visualization of Jeffrey Heer's personal friendster network to 3 hops out, an online social network consisting of Jeffrey, his "friends", his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends. The resulting networks consist of 47471 people connected by 432430 friendship relations. The data was collected during the timespan of October 2003 to February 2004 as part of the Vizster project. The images were created using the prefuse visualization toolkit.

Nodes are colored by proximity to the center of the network (which in this case is Jeffrey Heer himself). The central person is the brightest, that person's friends next brightest and so on. The elements are also ordered so that friends and relations closer from the central person are drawn on top of more distant relations and people. The graph layout was computed using a standard force-directed layout method in which nodes exert anti-gravity against each other and the edges are treated as springs.

Tables, and first world map showing lines of geomagnetism (isogons), used in work on finding longitude by means of magnetic variation. The tables give the world distribution of the variation, by latitude, along each of the meridians .

Mandea, M. and Mayaud, P.-N. (2004). Guillaume le nautonier, un precurseur dans l'histoire du géomagnétisme magnetism. Revue d'Histoire des Sciences , 57 (1):161-174.

Nautonier, G. L. (1602-1604). Mecometrie de l'eymant, c'est a dire la maniere de mesurer les longitudes par le moyen de l'eymant . Paris: n.p. BL: 533.k.9.

Cartographic Data Visualiser: a map visualization toolkit with graphical tools for viewing data, including a wide range of mapping options for exploratory spatial data analysis.

Dykes, J. A. (1996). Dynamic maps for spatial science, a unified approach to cartographic visualization. In D. Parker (ed.), Innovations in GIS 3, pp. 177-187. London: Taylor & Francis.

Not all thematic maps have to have a serious purpose. Cartes gastronomiques were quite common in the early 20th century and many fine examples are held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I found these examples in a brochure distributed by Coté France on the Autoroute du Sud. Now, what's the shortest distance between a Cantal and a pain de mie?

Display of multivariate data in the context of life-history.

Keiding, M. (1990). Statistical inference in the lexis diagram. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, series A, 332:487-509.

Life Support Systems - Vanda is an attempt to analyze electrical signals from the vanda hybrida orchid, and apply language modeling techniques to these signals in a computer. The result is a virtual model, which continues to generate similar signals long after the original orchids are gone - a kind of computerized longevity. Vandas language and behaviour model is stored in a hacked Microsoft Xbox, its future container. It can be accessed at any time, should one want to experience the essence of Vanda again. The work is installed as a kind of laboratorium with life support facilities for the orchids, a computer visualization of the language model, the Xbox, and the generated signals presented as sound. Besides turning a scientific experiment into an aesthetic construct, the work tangents questions of consciousness, longevity, and new lifeforms through computing.

This is a visualization of the structure of the Linux kernel, the core software of the operating system. It shows all the individual files of the kernel and the function calls between them. The visualization was created by Christian Reiniger at the Free Code Graphing Project, based on earlier work by Rusty Russell. There is a separate small section showing the code for ISDN drivers.

This is a visualization of the structure of the Linux kernel, the core software of the operating system. It shows all the individual files of the kernel and the function calls between them. The visualization was created by Christian Reiniger at the Free Code Graphing Project, based on earlier work by Rusty Russell. A small section showing the code for ISDN drivers is below. (To really see the detail you need to download the large postscript version.)

LJNet is an interactive visualization of LiveJournal.com (LJ) members' social networks. It shows the friends and friends of friends of any given LJ member. The user can simultaneously browse the networks of friendship connections and interest matches amongst all these displayed members. The user can do this by clicking on any user in the display - any non-friends of theirs will fade away and any member that shares interests with the clicked member will gain a translucent yellow halo (sized in relation to their shared interests).

LJNet is the work of Patrick Barry. It was made initially as a project in Golan Levin's class Information Visualization as Art Practice during his Master's coursework at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

The tile map is a useful semi-graphical display for data with seasonal variation. One square (tile) is plotted for each day of the year; the color of the tile shows the level of Ozone concentration in Los Angeles for that day, with lighter shades indicating lower concentration and darker shades showing higher concentrations. (Ed. note: This is true of the B/W version in the printed paper, but not true of the color version shown here, which uses 'elevation mapping' of colors to ozone concentration. The rendition in color is not exemplary.)

The figure shows the data for the 10 years, 1982 - 1991. Within each year, ozone concentrations are higher in the summer months; Over years, the concentrations in the summer months have decreased.

Figure from Mintz, D., Fitz-Simons, T. & Wayland, M. "Tracking Air Quality Trends with SAS/GRAPH", SUGI 22 Proceedings, 807-812.

Pictogram, used to represent data by icons proportional to a number.

Mulhall, M. G. (1884). Dictionary of statistics. London.

Edmund Halley prepared this map of the predicted path of the shadow of the moon over England. But, how to describe the process that created an eclipse? Halley used the diagram at the left to show how the moon passed between the earth and sun, creating the eclipse. The letters A, B, C, D, etc. to describe their relations. C, for example, refers to the part of England predicted to be most darkened (Northhampton, 54 miles from London).

The knowledge has revealed like a key factor in the development of any idea or project. Nowadays we are surrounded by information, but what really interests it is to be able to interpret and understand data, thus to obtain knowledge. For it, under the idea of this project, it has to arise a new form to show and to interact with the information: the schematic. The schematic is a logical and structured language, where data and abstract slight knowledge can be show in a "organized complex" visualization constituted by significant informative elements and the established underlying relations among them. Really, a place where the user can understand each data in its own context.

This flash tools visualizes a series of URL's organized by main areas such as: Design, Illustration, Photography, Music, Science, etc, in an effort to organize one's source of inspiration for new ideas to arise.

Mapping the evolving structure and content of large Web sites developed by Ed H. Chi, Stuart K. Card and colleagues at the User Interface Research group at Xerox PARC. The visualisation examples above use Cone Trees and Disk Trees within an interactive visualisation spreadsheet environment.

"Sensemaking of Evolving Web Site Using Visualization Spreadsheets"

EH Chi, SK Card - Information Visualization, 1999.(Info Vis' 99) Proceedings.

"Visualizing the Evolution of Web Ecologies".

Ed H. Chi, James Pitkow, Jock Mackinlay, Peter Pirolli, Rich Gossweiler,et al. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI'98

Mapping the evolving structure and content of large Web sites developed by Ed H. Chi, Stuart K. Card and colleagues at the User Interface Research group at Xerox PARC. The visualisation examples above use Cone Trees and Disk Trees within an interactive visualisation spreadsheet environment.

"Sensemaking of Evolving Web Site Using Visualization Spreadsheets"

EH Chi, SK Card - Information Visualization, 1999.(Info Vis' 99) Proceedings.

"Visualizing the Evolution of Web Ecologies".

Ed H. Chi, James Pitkow, Jock Mackinlay, Peter Pirolli, Rich Gossweiler,et al. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI'98

In this paper, the authors studied the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. The goal was to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, they analyzed the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities.

They also studied a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captured blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, the authors found differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.

The image shown, portraits the community structure of the analyzed political blogs (expanded set), shown using utilizing a GEM layout in the GUESS visualization and analysis tool. The colors reflect political orientation, red for conservative, and blue for liberal. Orange links go from liberal to conservative, and purple ones from conservative to liberal. The size of each blog reflects the number of other blogs that link to it.

2006-03-27: Market Radar: interactive data visualization of historical stock prices at SmartMoney.com

From InfoVis:Wiki

Market Radar - interactive data visualization of historical stock prices using dotplots

[SmartMoney.com, 2006]

THE MARKET RADAR is a new way to get a broad, historical view of stock prices. Our first radar tool displays nine years of weekly price changes for 500 companies — more than 200,000 data points in all. Presenting such a large database in a single picture makes it possible to see market dynamics that might otherwise be invisible.

[...]

Each weekly price change is represented by a single dot on the screen, colored green if the stock went up that week and red if it went down. Large movements are colored brightly, while smaller changes are dimmer. The dots are arranged in a grid, with each row representing a single company's performance, and columns representing points in time. The labels at top show the passage of time. The companies are grouped by sector and industry.

[SmartMoney.com, 2006]

Details: http://www.smartmoney.com/marketradar/

via information aesthetics blog

[SmartMoney.com, 2006] SmartMoney.com, Market Radar, Retrieved at: March 27, 2006. http://www.smartmoney.com/marketradar/

Mechanical diagrams of knowledge, as aids to reasoning (served as an inspiration to Leibnitz in the development of symbolic logic) (Spain).

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, Joao Roque, Andrea Vallenti and Joao Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He is part of the team (with Luis Silva Dias, João Roque, Andrea Vallenti and João Roque) that produced the flags campaign which has been circulating the Earth in chain letters via e-mail. Icaro gave us a small statement about the campaign, translated by Isabell Erdmann:

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.

This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

The graph represents dependencies between modifications to a large program. Because testing such programs is difficult and expensive, the graph was made to discover which subsets of modifications might be tested separately by understanding or even eliminating a few key dependencies.

Graph and tree visualization techniques enable interactive exploration of complex relations while communicating topology. However, most existing techniques have not been designed for situations where visual information such as images is also present at each node and must be displayed. MoireGraphs intents to address this need. MoireGraphs combine a focus+context radial graph layout with a suite of interaction techniques (focus strength changing, radial rotation, level highlighting, secondary foci, animated transitions and node information) to assist in the exploration of graphs with visual nodes. The method is scalable to hundreds of displayed visual nodes.

Source: IEEE Computer Science Press 2003

Mosaic display á la Hartigan and Kleiner.

Hartigan, J. A. and Kleiner, B. (1981). Mosaics for contingency tables. In W. F. Eddy (ed.), Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on the Interface, pp. 268-273. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.

Friendly, M. (2002). A brief history of the mosaic display. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 11(1):89-107.

From the book: Racinet, Auguste. Full-Color Picture Sourcebook of Historic Ornament: All 120 Plates from "L'Ornement Polychrome," Series II. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989.

Location: Plate 54

Meyer, Franz Sales. Handbook of Ornament. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957.

Discovery of the concept of atomic number, based largely on graphical analysis (a plot of serial numbers of the elements vs. square root of frequencies from X-ray spectra) The linear relations showed that the periodic table was explained by atomic number rather than, as had been supposed, atomic weight, and predicted the existence of several yet-undiscovered elements.

Moseley, H. (1913). The high frequency spectra of the elements. Philosophical Magazine, 26:1024-1034. (Part II, 27:1914, pp.703-).

This project has been initiated during the first "Digital Information Design Camp" (DID), a three-week-long course organized by Professor John Maeda in the summer of 2005, and its original idea (v.1.0) was done with the supervision of Ben Fry. MSN History Visualization reads the xml files that are being stored by the MSN, and makes a graphical display that allows comparisons between conversations with different people and tries to answer to the following questions:

- How many words do I use to write in each utterance?
- Which are the words that I use at the most?

The application has been thought to be downloaded and used by any person who has stored his conversations using the MSN history.

A graphical display of the time course of Minard's works reveals some interesting patterns. The plot below shows the time course of Minard's graphic output with a smooth (loess) curve, in relation to some events in his life. Tick marks at the top and bottom show the date of each each graphic work, categorized by content (related to the distribution of Goods vs. Other topics).

Minard's flow map graphic of Napoleon's March on Moscow (called "the best graphic ever produced" by Tufte).

Minard, C. J. (20 Nov. 1869). Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armée qu'Annibal conduisit d'Espagne en Italie en traversant les Gaules (selon Polybe). Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armée française dans la campagne de Russie, 1812-1813. lith. (624 x 207, 624 x 245). ENPC: Fol 10975, 10974/C612.

Tufte, E. R. (1983). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Central to the Society of Mind are the concepts of 'nemes', which are agencies responsible for representing fragments of states of minds. Together with K-lines, they form critical bridges interconnecting agents in different ways.

"The goal of our project will be to create a Neme simulator that illustrates the three axes of topology, function, and environment. Each of these axes will be illustrated by a system that allows active manipulation and graphical visualization of nemetic structure, its interactions with agents, or exposure to a variety of stimuli. Additionally, since the human mind would have to contain millions of complex interconnected nemes in order to enable us to recognize, memorize, and associate concepts the way we do, we will in this project, discuss the scalability of nemetic structures."

Netscan is an ambitious project analysing the social structure of Usenet news. It is being developed by Marc Smith, a research sociologist at Microsoft Research.




This example is a screenshot of the Crosspost Visualization tool of Netscan which enables you to analyse the connections between newsgroups.




[For more information see the Map of Month article, "Netscan Project: Mapping the Social Geography of Usenet News".]

Networks can be represented in many different forms, each of which may be projected into different mathematical spaces for analysis.

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.

Radial formats provide alternate ways of layering, integrating, and navigating networks. This “combination lock” approach to decision making uses stepwise combinatorics to selectively navigate a solution space.

Other network representations include more conventional node-link diagrams that can expose network vulnerabilities, highlight optimal paths, and cluster nodes for analysis, and even quantitative icons that can help to explore the dynamics of interacting subnetworks.

Network visualizations can take unexpected forms, such as discontinuous yet related glyphs for wayfinding through regions with varying resources.

Other network representations include node-link diagrams that can expose network vulnerabilities, highlight optimal paths, and cluster nodes for analysis, as well as radial formats that provide alternate ways of layering, integrating, and navigating networks.

Layering and integrating networks presents information in a form for rapid analysis. Layers may consist of different network representations, such as node-link diagrams, radial formats, and quantitative icons.

Node-link diagrams can expose critical network vulnerabilities and highlight optimal paths.

Networks can be represented in a multitude of forms quite distinct from node-link diagrams. For example, radial formats provide alternate ways of layering, integrating, and navigating networks, and even quantitative icons can help to explore the dynamics of interacting subnetworks.

Mark Lombardi (1955-2000) was an abstract painter, best known for his network diagrams of crime and conspiracy. Lombardi's drawings attempt to document financial and political frauds by power brokers. Nodes in the diagrams represent individuals, corporations and government agencies, connected by lines showing associations, deals and so forth.

His 1999 drawing, entitled George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979-90, shows the proven connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world. Thirteen lines originate with or point to James R. Bath, more than any other name presented. Among those linked to this obscure yet central character are George W. Bush, Jr., George H.W. Bush, Sr., Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Governor John B. Connally of Texas, Sheik Salim bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, and Sheik Salim's younger brother, Osama bin Laden.

Lombardi's other network diagrams relate to the Iran-Contra Affair, World Finance Corporation, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and so forth. Each was based on thousands of notes gathered from news reports and written on index cards.

This Semantic Map is part of the netzspannung.org project that is lead by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss at the MARS Exploratory Media Lab, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft - Institute for Media Communication. The netzspannung.org project is funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).

The basic idea behind the Map is to graphically present and communicate the content of the netzspannung.org database as well as visualizing metadata about the content. The graphical visualization presents the data in a intuitive way, so the constellations of the data form a statement about their contextual surroundings. They are part of the netzspannung.org tools.

Newspapers and magazines usually choose simplicity over detail, because it is hard to show much information in a single, comprehensible display. A collection of truly bad examples from the popular media are shown on our Darts pages. Here, the attention to detail, and to graphic design are evident.

This graph, from the New York Times (Jan. 11, 1981, p. 32; Tufte (1983), p. 30) shows--- both valiantly, and sucessfully--- 2200 numbers which summarize the trends and patterns in weather in New York City in 1980. The three aligned charts show temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity. In the graph of temperature, the area is filled between the daily low and daily high.

What makes this graph successful, in spite of the large amount of information presented are (a) clear visual comparisons between the 1980 data and the long-run average, (b) clear textual labels, (c) visual segregation between the three series. For example, it is easy to see that March and April were about of normal temperature, but a lot wetter.

The difference between displaying networks with 100-1,000 nodes and displaying ones with 10,000-100,000 nodes is not merely quantitative, it is qualitative. Layout algorithms suitable for the former are too slow for the latter, requiring new algorithms or modified (often relaxed) versions of existing algorithms to be invented. The density of nodes and edges displayed per inch of screen real estate requires special visual techniques to filter the graphs and focus attention.

NicheWorks is a visualization tool for the investigation of very large graphs. By 'very large' we mean graphs for which we cannot look at the complete set of labeled nodes and edges on one static display. Typical analyses performed using NicheWorks have between 20,000 and 1,000,000 nodes. On current mid-range workstations, a network of around 50,000 nodes and edges can be visualized and manipulated in real time with ease. Increased size decreases interactive performance linearly. NicheWorks allows the user to examine a variety of node and edge attributes in conjunction with their connectivity information. Categorical, textual and continuous attributes can be explored with a variety of one-way, two-way, and multidimensional views.

Otter is a historical CAIDA tool used for visualizing arbitrary network data that can be expressed as a set of nodes, links or paths. Otter was developed to handle visualization tasks for a wide variety of Internet data, including data sets on topology, workload, performance, and routing. Otter is in maintenance rather than development mode.

Nodecurated is a management tool for online curatorships. This tool synthesizes the basic parameters defined in the functions of author as manager and work of art as a tool, where the user plays the determinant role in its configuration. Nevertheless, this project aims to be a tool of analysis of the practices of creation on the net. In this way, an open context is defined in the environment of cultural production on the net, favoring the presence of conceptual suggestions in the area of digital practices.

Nodecurated is a system of information visualization for curatorial projects on the net, a field where there is too much dependence on traditional curatorial projects. Nodecurated proposes to rethink of the net from the net itself, putting forward a tool of dialogue, where the different suggestions of curatorial practice do not remain unheard but open to multiple relationships through the process of the reading of these.

NodeMail is a visualization tool for email and a free and open device for social activism. The application renders NetActivism visible by exploiting email technology. It provides information about the social relations that configure the communication of any activism-related message.

Nodemail works as follows: everytime someone generates a message through the online application, a principal node is created. For each user who receives the message, another node is created, and the hierarchies among these are maintained by chronological order. In this manner, the user can see who has sent the message for the first time, to whom he or she has sent them, how it arrives, and which users it has gone through. The user can also see how far his or her voice reached, and how his or her contacts sent the message to others all the way to the thousands or millions. It is a free and open tool for social mobilization, for each user is free to use this device to send content.

Currently, Nodemail can only visualize the spread of one message at a time, but the authors hope that in a future version they'll be able implement the working of several messages at the same time.

BrainMaps.org is an interactive zoomable high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope that is based on more than 10 million megapixels of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate brains and that is integrated with a high-speed database for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet. Currently featured are complete brain atlas datasets for various species, including Macaca mulatta, C. aethiops, Felis catus, and Mus musculus.

On their website one can find a suite of desktop applications for interacting with and analyzing BrainMaps.org data. One of this applications (featured here) is Nodes3D, a 3D graph visualization program written by Issac Trotts in consultation with Shawn Mikula, in the labs of Edward G. Jones.

Nomogram of chemical concentrations in blood, showing the relations among over 20 components.

Henderson, L. J. (1928). Blood: A Study in General Physiology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Invention of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines.

van Rupelmonde, G. M. (1569). Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantum emendate accomodata.

Museum of Social Statistical Graphics and the ISOTYPE system (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Neurath, O. (1973). From Vienna method to Isotype. In M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, pp. 214-248. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel. (papers written 1925-45).

Neurath, O. (1991). Gesammelte Bildpaedagogische Schriften. Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky. ISBN 3209008639. Rudolf Haller and Robin Kinross (eds.).

Stereogram (three-dimensional population pyramid) modeled on actual data (Swedish census, 1750-1875).

Perozzo, L. (1880). Della rappresentazione graphica di una collettività di individui nella successione del tempo. Annali di Statistica, 12:1-16. BL: S.22.

Timothy O'Brien used Python and GraphViz to generate this astonishing visualization of his 1st and 2nd level of connections on the O'Reilly Connection social networking site. The red highlighted connections are from Tim O'Reilly to other people, and, predictably, he's at the center of the activity.

The graph was created by crawling FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) documents from Timothy's O'Reilly Connection profile and then obtaining the FOAF documents of people associated with him. The results were then stored in a neato format and visualized using graphviz neato.

Proto-bar graph (of a theoretical function), and development of the logical relation between tabulating values, and graphing them (pre-dating Descartes). Oresme proposed the use of a graph for plotting a variable magnitude whose value depends on another, and, implicitly, the idea of a coordinate system- Nicole Oresme (Bishop of Lisieus).

Oresme, N. (1482). Tractatus de latitudinibus formarum. Padova. BL: IA 3Q024.

Oresme, N. (1968). Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions: A Treatise on the Uniformity and Difformity Known as Tractatus de Configrationibus Qualitatum et Motuum . Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Tr.: M. Clagget.

The first modern atlas, Teatrum Orbis Terrarum.

Ortelius, A. (May 1570). Theatrum Orbis Terrarum . Antwerp: Coppenium Diesth. 53 maps in coperplate, 41 x 29 cm.

Classical suppression refers to the paradoxical result that a predictor variable (X1) may have no correlation with an outcome variable (Y), yet it increases the variance accounted for (R2) in a multiple regression with another predictor (X2). A variety of other paradoxical effects (enhancement, redundancy) can also occur, depending on the correlations among these variables.

This diagram, by Friedman and Wall (2005), puts all these effects in context. It shows the regression coefficients and R2 for particular values of the correlations of Y with X1 and X2, as the correlation r12 between X1 and X2 varies over its range. The regions in which various effects occur are demarked by vertical lines.

Reference: Friedman, L. and Wall, M. (2005), Graphical views of suppression and multicolinearity in multiple linear regression, The American Statistician, 59(2), 127-136.

Invention of the first practical photographic process, using coated plates of metal and glass.

This example illustrates the use of partially transparent colors for node fill and graph background.

A customer browsing a company website leaves traces in the form of log files generated by the server. When analyzed, those files reveal significant information about the customer's on-line activity. PathFinder is a system that analyses web server log files. It displays the website structure and the customers navigation paths in a 3d visualization.

PathFinder aims at helping website designers and administrators to discover the standard navigation paths of the website and to use this information to improve the site content and ergonomics. It is built in order to answer 3 fundamental questions: What paths are used to reach a specific page? What paths are typical of a specific time/date? What pages are often/rarely accessed?

As a prototype, PathFinder explores an alternative way of communicating web usage information. PathFinder represents the website structure in the form of a 3d cone tree. The idea of the cone tree is to display each node at the top of a 3d cone and to arrange the nodes hierarchically lower around the cone's circular base.

The project was programmed in Java. It can be decomposed in three main parts. The first part is a web crawler (sometimes also called spider or robot) that is used to grab the structure of the web sites. The second part is responsible for the analysis of the log files. The third part, realized with Java3D, controls the 3d visualization.

Roger Penrose, a math professor at the Oxford University in England, began exploring tilings as a student at Cambridge University. After tiring of periodic coverings, he searched for aperiodic or quasiperiodic tilings. Through years of experimentation and reams of paper, Penrose finally found a solution--a quasiperiodic tiling of the plane with only 2 figures. All of this may seem like a joke, to dedicate years of research to pretty pictures, but an application was found by a French company, in the quasiperiodic crystal coating on frying pans!

A penrose tiling is an example of quasiperiodic tilings of the plane. A tiling of a plane is a way in which the entire space of the plane can be covered with a few shapes repeatedly in such a way that the shapes do not overlap. A periodic tiling is one in which the pattern of shapes repeats. For such a tiling to be quasiperiodic, it is not periodic, but identical copies of small sections of the tiling can be found elsewhere on the plane.

The periodic table used to classify chemical elements according to their properties, and allowing the prediction of new elements that would be discovered later.

2005-08-26: New article on visualizion techniques for the Usenet

From InfoVis:Wiki

Treemap of January 2004 Usenet posts.

[Turner et al., 2005]

The current issue (10(4), 2005) of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication contains a special theme on "Online Communities". One of the articles is about information visualization techniques used for the Usenet:

Picturing Usenet: Mapping Computer-Mediated Collective Action

[Turner et al., 2005] Turner, T. C., Smith, M. A., Fisher, D., and Welser, H. T. Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 7, 2005.

Map incorporating statistical diagrams: circles proportional to coal production (published in 1861).

Minard, C. J. (1861). Des Tableaux Graphiques et des Cartes Figuratives. Paris: E. Thunot et Cie. ENPC: 3386/C161; BNF: V-16168.

PieSpy is an IRC bot that monitors a set of IRC channels. It uses a simple set of heuristics to infer relationships between pairs of users. These inferrences allow PieSpy to build a mathematical model of a social network for any channel. These social networks can be drawn and used to create animations of evolving social networks.

PieSpy was presented at the Information Visualization conference (IV'04) in July 2004. It has also appeared in Computer Weekly and c't magazine.

Earliest known attempt to show changing values graphically (positions of the sun, moon, and planets throughout the year)(Europe)

Graphical methods applied to explain fundamental relations in thermodynamics; this includes diagrams of entropy vs. temperature (where work or heat is proportional to area), and the first use of trilinear coordinates (graphs of (x,y,z) where x+y+z=constant).

Bumstead, H. A. (ed.) (1961). The Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs . New York: Dover Publications, Inc. (an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Longmans, Green and Company in 1906).

Gibbs, J. W. (1873). Graphical methods in the thermodynamics of fluids. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2:309-342. Reprinted in Bumstead (above).

Gibbs, J. W. (1873). A method of geometrical representation of the thermodynamic properties of substances by means of surfaces. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2:382-404. Reprinted in Bumstead (above).

First successful photograph produced (an 8-hour exposure). [A type of asphalt (bitumen of Judea) was coated on metal plates. After exposure it was washed in solvents, the light areas were shown by the bitumen, dark areas by bare metal. Exposed to iodine, the plate darkened in the shadowed areas.].

Age pyramid (bilateral histogram), bilateral frequency polygon, and the use of subdivided squares to show the division of population by two variables jointly (an early mosaic display) in the first true U.S. national statistical atlas.

Walker, F. A. (1874). Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Results of Ninth Census, 1870, with Contributions from Many Eminent Men of Science and Several Departments of the [Federal] Government. New York: Julius Bien.

Multi-number graphical calculation (proto-nomogram: contours applied to multiplication table, later rectified by Lalanne -- see ref. below).

Pouchet, L. E. (1795). Arithmétique linéaire. In Echelle Graphique des Nouveaux Poids, Mesures et Monnaies de la République Française . Rouen: Seyer. (Appendix).

Lalanne, L. (1846). Mémoire sur les tables graphiques et sur la géométrie anamorphique appliquées a diverses questions qui se rattachent a l'art de l'ingénieur. Annales des Ponts et Chausées , 2e series, 11 :1-69. Read 1843.

Street maps of London, showing poverty and wealth by color coding, transforming existing methods of social survey and poverty mapping towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Booth, C. (1889). Charles Booth's descriptive map of London poverty 1889 by Charles Booth; introduction by David A. Reeder. London: London Topographical Society, 1984. BL: Maps 182.c.1 Facsimile of maps published in Labour and Life of the People, Appendix to vol. II, 1891.

Booth, C. (1889). Labour and Life of the People. London: Macmillan and Co. (2 volumes, plus maps under separate cover; expanded to 17 volumes in 1902 edition).

prefuse is a user interface toolkit for building highly interactive visualizations of structured and unstructured data. This includes any form of data that can be represented as a set of entities (or nodes) possibly connected by any number of relations (or edges). Examples of data supported by prefuse include hierarchies (organization charts, taxonomies, file systems), networks (computer networks, social networks, web site linkage) and even non-connected collections of data (timelines, scatterplots).

These images show a prefuse applet that visualizes suspected connections between terrorists involved in the September 11th attacks. The width of the line indicates how strong the suspected link is. People are placed on concentric circles based on the number of links between them and the central person, making it easy to measure the social distance between the central person and any other person.

This applet applies re-implementations of techniques used in Animated Exploration of Dynamic Graphs with Radial Layout by Ping Yee, Danyel Fisher, Rachna Dhamija, and Marti Hearst, IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2001.

Form of Fourier series to generate plots of multivariate data.

Andrews, D.F. (1972). Plots of high dimensional data. Biometrics, 28:125-136.

Bar chart, line graphs of economic data.

Playfair, W. (1786). Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure, and Debts of England, during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century . London: Corry. Re-published in Wainer, H. and Spence, I. (eds.), The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, 2005, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-85554-3.

Diagrams developed to represent color systems. In 1758, Mayer developed a system of constructing and naming many of the possible colours. Lambert extended this with a 3D pyramid indicating "depth" (saturation).



Harris, M. (1766). The natural system of colours , chap. Prismatic color mixture system. Licester-Fields: Laidler.

First use of areas of rectangles to display probabilities of independent binary events.

Halley, E. (1693). An estimate of the degrees of mortality of mankind, drawn from curious tables of the births and funerals at the city of Breslaw, with an attempt to ascertain the price of annuities on lives. Philosophical Transactions, 17 :596-610.

This graph was created from a hand-made figure in an operating system paper.

This is the dynamic profile of a sort program, generated from the 'gprof' tool. Nodes represent functions and edges represent function calls. They are colored according to gprof's estimate of the time spent within a given function and the time charged to a given call site. The colors are encoded as hue-saturation-brightness triples. We have found it advantageous to vary both hue and saturation to draw attention to hot spots, rather than present a baffling rainbow of colors.

LGL (Large Graph Layout) is a compendium of software applications for making the visualization of large networks and trees tractable. LGL was specifically motivated by the need to make the visualization and exploration of large biological networks more accessible.

The website contains a rich gallery with a collection of different graphs and trees generated by LGL from different sources of biological data.

This image represents a Protein Homology Graph - 32,727 Proteins with 1,206,654 Edges. Color coded is based on layout hierarchy.

LGL (Large Graph Layout) is a compendium of software applications for making the visualization of large networks and trees tractable. LGL was specifically motivated by the need to make the visualization and exploration of large biological networks more accessible.

The website contains a rich gallery with a collection of different graphs and trees generated by LGL from different sources of biological data.

This image portraits the Protein Homology Network in an impressive visualization. The network summarizes the results of aprox. 92 billion pairwise amino acid sequence alignments between 289,069 proteins from 90 genomes. The final network is composed of 27,325 connected sets summing to 7,940,873 edges. An edge is colored blue if it connectes 2 proteins from the same species, and red if it connects 2 proteins from 2 different species. If that information is not available the edges are colored based on layout hierarchy.

Map projections of a spherical earth and use of latitude and longitude to characterize position (first display of longitude) - Alexandria, Egypt.

PubNet is a utility that accepts as input up to two PubMed queries, and returns as output a network graph (in multiple image formats) based on user-specified node and edge selection properties. PubMed is a search system offered by the United States National Library of Medicine as part of the Entrez system. It provides a means of searching the MEDLINE database.

The resulting nodes from PubNet output represent data items associated with publications returned by the queries (such as paper ids, author names, and databank ids), and edges represent instances of shared properties. PubNet can be used to visualize a variety of relationships, such as the degree to which two authors collaborate or the MeSH Term relatedness of publications with PDB ids. The visualization is done with the aid of aiSee visualization software.

The particular image on the left is the result of two queries: Mark+Mike.

Semilogarithmic grid (showing percentage changes in commodities).

Jevons, W. S. (1863). A serious fall in the value of gold ascertained, and its social effects set fourth. London.

Jevons, W. S. ([1879] 1958). Graphical method. In Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, pp. 492-496. New York: Dover, 3rd edn. First ed.: 1874; page numbers from 3rd Ed. Dover reprint (1958).

A real-world network containing 300 sites over 40 countries. The diagram was made to trace network incidents and to support maintenance. Original names and other details were obfuscated for anonymity. (This was not an AT&T network!) Drawn using twopi.

This tool is an extended version of the Radial Tree Browser. The original version was developed by Jason Baumgartner and Nihar Sheth and is an integral part of the Information Visualization Software Repository (IV repository) at Indiana University.

Pictogram, used to represent data by icons proportional to a number.

Mulhall, M. G. (1884). Dictionary of statistics. London.

This version of Minard's Napolean's March is by Menno-Jan Kraak, of the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC) is one of several 3D renditions on a lovely web site, Geovisualization and Minard's Map (http://www.itc.nl/personal/kraak/1812/). This one unravels time into the 3rd dimension, superposed above the base map.

The web site contains the largest collection of variations of Minard's map, with several interactive and animated versions, and a comprehensive list of references and other links.

Flash version:

http://www.itc.nl/personal/kraak/1812/3dnap.swf

Robert Allison created this two-level, zoomable version with interactive tooltips, as a lovely "proof-of-concept" example. He used SAS/GRAPH map data sets for the map information, and PROC GMAP to draw the map, using the SAS/GRAPH annotate facility to overlay Minard's data on the map. The interactive zooming and tooltips make use of the SAS ODS facility.

How he did it:

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/minard/allison/minard_info.htm

Robert Allison created this two-level, zoomable version with interactive tooltips, as a lovely "proof-of-concept" example. He used SAS/GRAPH map data sets for the map information, and PROC GMAP to draw the map, using the SAS/GRAPH annotate facility to overlay Minard's data on the map. The interactive zooming and tooltips make use of the SAS ODS facility.

This version of Minard's Napolean's March is an animated GIF image, from Max Boylan at SFSU. We start with an empty map on June 24, 1812, as the campaign begins at the Nemen River with 422,000 troops. The animation shows the step-by-step progress of the Grand Army to Moscow and back. The coding of temperature by color is done somewhat better than in the SAGE graphic above. The animation repeats 10 times.

This version of Minard's Napolean's March, by Aaron Walburg and Stephen Hartzog, listed on the University of York History of Statistics page uses a real map of the region from Poland to Moscow as the background. It overlays on this an animated sequence showing the size of Napoleon's army (with dates), and the retreat, together with the decline of temperature.

Static image:

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/minard/march-animated.gif

ODT, Inc. has recently published Seeing Through Maps: The Power of Images to Shape Our World View by Ward Kaiser and Denis Wood.

It contains this version of Minard's image with the caption translated into English and displayed legibly. The scale of temperature is displayed in both F and Celsius and given somewhat more prominence and readability.

In Chapter 15 of The Grammar of Graphics, Wilkinson (1999) describes the encoding of the information from Minard's graphic according to his graph grammar. This is notable because the specification for the graph is declarative (what the graph consists of) rather than procedural (how to draw it).

The WWW and other new technology (CD rom, DVD) allows the easy integration of the easy integration of text, graphics, sound, and other media. Andrew Donoho teaches an Information Design course at the University of Texas at Austin. For the past several years, a course project asked students to design a web presentation based on Minard's graphic. Sunny's page is one example of the graphic linked (as an image map) to pages of text describing the major battles of the campaign. Another image map compares the account in War and Peace with historical sources.

Lori Eichelberger's page (http://www.ddg.com/LIS/InfoDesignF97/lkeich/index.htm) is another example, relating the March on Moscow to the memoirs of Francois Bourgogne, a Sergeant in Napoleon's Imperial Guard. Other interesting attempts may be found on the LIS Class Projects page (http://www.ddg.com/LIS/).

This graph, from the Visualization and Intelligent Interfaces group at CMU is one re-design, attempting to link the information about temperature directly to the path and strength of Napoleon's army, emphasizing their interrelations more directly. The (X,Y) coordinates are still map-based (latitude and longitude).

"The use of color clearly shows the heat wave during the advance and the steady decline in temperature through the retreat. The exception, a spell of temperatures above freezing, is clearly visible when the retreating army is between the cities of Krasnyj and Bobr."

Sage Visualization Group, Carnegie Mellon University:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sage/

"The temporal characteristics of the march were weakly conveyed in the original because they were expressed as text labels. Here the relation between date, troop location (longitude only), and temperature is more strongly conveyed because they are all exp ressed as properties of the rectangles. Battle sites are indicated in text."

Sage Visualization Group, Carnegie Mellon University:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sage/

In Chapter 4 of Applied Mathematica: Getting Started, Getting it Done, Shaw and Tigg (1993) describe a Mathematica function, NapoleonicMarchOnMoscowAndBackAgainPlot[] to re-create a close approximation to Minard's graphic.

A simpler function, Minard[] in the file Minard.m draws the same graph.

SAS/IML Workshop is client-server extension of the SAS Interactive Matrix Language, with an object-oriented flavor. This version, programmed in NapoleonsMarch.iml, works by defining a data structure and modules suitable to drawing paths on a 2D surface, a generalization of Minard's idea of the flow map.

Idea:

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/minard/IML-thinking.html

Code:

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/minard/NapoleonsMarch.iml

In an article published in Technical Communication, August 2001, Dragga and Voss "The Inhumanity of Technical Illustrations" suggest that Minard's graphic does not convey the human cost directly--- ``We don't see the people and we don't see their anguish.'' They present this image using pictographs, which gradually change from soldiers to burial crosses, to illustrate how "ethically conscious technical communicators could introduce the human element..."

From John Schneider's Napoleonic Literature page (http://www.napoleonic-literature.com/index.html); this is the largest and most detailed re-creation of Minard's graphic I have found on the Web. All the place names and troop strengths are highly legible. The Napoleonic Literature site contains many electronic books and a wealth of information.

Statistical graphics interactively linked to map displays.

Wills, G., Haslett, J., Unwin, A. R., and Craig, P. (1989). Dynamic interactive graphics for spatially referenced data. In F. Faulbaum (ed.), Fortschritte der Statistik-Software 2, pp. 278-287. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag.

Monmonier, M. (1989). Geographic brushing: Enhancing exploratory analysis of the scatterplot matrix. Geographical Analysis, 21 (1):81-84.

Minard as a visual engineer: Report on the collapse of a bridge over the Rhone in 1840.

Minard's main career was as an engineer for the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees in Paris. In 1840 he was asked to investigate the cause of the collapse of the bridge at Bourg St. Andeol on the Rhone. His report consisted of this drawing, to which words provide little extra by way of explanation.

Why did the bridge collapse? As shown, the bed beneath the left side of the bridge had washed away.

Image source: Tufte (1983, p. 39)

Parallel coordinates plots for high-dimensional data.

Inselberg, A. (1985). The plane with parallel coordinates. The Visual Computer, 1:69-91.

Inselberg, A. (1989). Discovering multi-dimensional structure using parallel coordinates. In Proc. Amer. Stat. Assoc, Sec. on Stat.Graphics, pp. 1-16. American Statistical Association. ISBN 0-8186-2083-8 (PAPER).

Inselberg, A. and Dimsdale, B. (1990). Parallel coordinates: a tool for visualizing multi-dimensional geometry. In VIS '90: Proceedings of the 1st conference on Visualization '90, pp. 361-378. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 0-8186-2083-8 (PAPER).

Parallel coordinates plots for high-dimensional data.

Inselberg, A. (1985). The plane with parallel coordinates. The Visual Computer, 1:69-91.

Inselberg, A. (1989). Discovering multi-dimensional structure using parallel coordinates. In Proc. Amer. Stat. Assoc, Sec. on Stat.Graphics, pp. 1-16. American Statistical Association. ISBN 0-8186-2083-8 (PAPER).

Inselberg, A. and Dimsdale, B. (1990). Parallel coordinates: a tool for visualizing multi-dimensional geometry. In VIS '90: Proceedings of the 1st conference on Visualization '90, pp. 361-378. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 0-8186-2083-8 (PAPER).

This diagram represents a system of three Research Organizations and the participation of the 25 most significant industrial companies in their advisory committees. The number of spatial positions has been enhanced by 50 percent.

Revealicious is a set of graphic visualisations for any del.icio.us account that allows one to browse, search and select tags, as well as viewing posts matching them. As the authors clarify: Revealicious is a graphic design project lead from June to September 2005. It was developed in ActionScript 2.0 using MTASC and SWFMill. Its aim is to demonstrate how using different kind of visualisations can reveal surprising aspects of information. Del.icio.us was chosen as a source of data because of the unformalised semantic richness of its tag system.

The images on the left illustrate one of Revealicious visualization methods entitled SpaceNav. It lets the user explore their del.icio.us tags represented as an inifinite 2D space. It enables one to discover the relations between their tags, as well as recognize different patterns and characteristics of certain groups of tags.

rkssc Project Network is a visualization of the database of a business consultant and a representation of lateral thinking.

The projects are categorised by industry and expertise. A project is represented as a connection between an industry and an expertise. The user can choose a category and the system then shows all connections of the chosen category. The projects are not shown as separate units but as a network.

Museum of Social Statistical Graphics and the ISOTYPE system (International System of Typographic Picture Education).

Neurath, O. (1973). From Vienna method to Isotype. In M. Neurath and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, pp. 214-248. Dordrecht, NL: Reidel. (papers written 1925-45).

Neurath, O. (1991). Gesammelte Bildpaedagogische Schriften. Vienna: Verlag Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky. ISBN 3209008639. Rudolf Haller and Robin Kinross (eds.).

This picture, generated with the SAGE system, depicts most of the information in Minard's original picture. The same data set was mapped to different graphical techniques. The temporal characteristics of the march were weakly conveyed in the original because they were expressed as text labels. Here the relation between date, troop location (longitude only), and temperature is more strongly conveyed because they are all expressed as properties of the rectangles. Battle sites are indicated in text.

Notice the clear gaps which indicate lengthy stays at particular locations as well as the battle sites indicated as yellow diamonds. In the original picture it was not clear what happened along the northern flank of the army. Here it is clear: it branched off from the main force, captured Polock in August and remained there until after a second battle in October. Later in November, they rejoined the main retreat as the temperature dropped dramatically.

This graphic demonstrates the utility of SAGE for exploratory data analysis. Users can obtain displays of diverse combinations of information. The graphic integrates a unique combination of network, map (2D coordinates), and conventional chart size, color, and gauge techniques in a single display. Current research is focusing on interactive control of the design characteristics and information content of displays.

The full impact of applying AI techniques to automate the process of designing graphics will be realized when SAGE can support 3D visualization. As these graphics illustrate, we are exploring 3D approaches to represent this knowledge both for 3D graphics drawn in perspective and using binocular, stereoscopic display technology.

This picture is a snapshot of a 3D environment in which planners can interactively explore supply networks and inventory requirements for distribution areas. The green pipes along the surface plane represent main transportation routes (MSR). The green rectangles emanating from the center of each MSR can convey its capacity, quantities o materials currently flowing along it, demand or other quantitative characteristics. The MSRs connect supply points (yellow cylinders), whose heights also convey relevant quantities (e.g. the total requirements for distribution areas expected to obtain materials from it). Distribution areas are represented as rectangles whose heights convey material requirements. A thin line connects each distribution area to the supply point which provide its materials.

This picture, generated with the SAGE system, uses most of the same techniques as the original by Minard. The flexibility of SAGE's graphic design environment enabled the use of color to express temperature during marches between cities, emphasizing the relation between quantities and locations more directly.

The use of color clearly shows the heat wave during the advance and the steady decline in temperature through the retreat. The exception, a spell of temperatures above freezing, is clearly visible when the retreating army is between the cities of Krasnyj and Bobr.

2005-08-24: "Schemaball" - Schema Viewer for SQL Databases

From InfoVis:Wiki

Visualization of a MySQL Database schema [Krzywinski, 2004]

Schemaball is a flexible schema visualizer for SQL databases. The purpose of Schemaball is to help visualize the relationships between tables. Tables are related by foreign keys, which are fields which store the value of a record field from another table. Foreign keys create a lookup relationship between two tables. Large schemas can have hundreds of tables and table relationships. Keeping track of them call can be tedious, error-prone and slow down the schema development process. Schemaball provides a means to create flexible, static graphic images of a schema. Tables and table links can be hidden, highlighted and foreign key relationships can be traversed forward or backward to highlight connected tables.

Schemaball produces images called schema balls. Schema balls are schema visualizations in which tables are ordered along a circle with table relationships drawn as curves or straight lines. Using an input configuration file, all elements of the schema ball can be configured.

Schemaball is free software, licensed under GPL. It is written in Perl and requires a few CPAN modules to run. It's simple to use, while being able to produce high quality schema balls suitable for publication. In particular, you can use Schemaball to generate elements of a schema ball and then create a composite in an image editing program. One such result is shown in the figure at right.

[Krzywinski, 2004]

via information aesthetics blog

[Krzywinski, 2004] Martin Krzywinski, Schemaball - Schema Viewer for SQL Databases, Created at: 2004, Retrieved at: 2005-08-24, http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/schemaball/

The aim of SDM is to provide users with a high degree of selectivity and object dynamics while manipulating visualizations to analyze and explore diverse information. It does this by giving users freedom in manipulating 2D and 3D objects while providing constraints and feedback to prevent confusion. In support of this, SDM allows flexible control of any object parameter. One example of this is shown in these three figures. Many of the selected objects (shown in green) are occluded and it is difficult to analyze them as a set.

Using SDM, selected objects can be elevated over the scene (not shown here), thus eliminating occlusion while maintaining context. Users can also accomplish the same goal by shifting selecting objects horizontally. Spatial shift operations are also useful for creating subsets of objects in the visualization. Spatial shift operations maintain relative positions, and thus can be manipulated separately to view patterns within them.

The aim of SDM is to provide users with a high degree of selectivity and object dynamics while manipulating visualizations to analyze and explore diverse information. It does this by giving users freedom in manipulating 2D and 3D objects while providing constraints and feedback to prevent confusion. In support of this, SDM allows flexible control of any object parameter. Many of the selected objects (shown in white) are occluded and it is difficult to analyze them as a set.

Using SDM, selected objects can be elevated over the scene, thus eliminating occlusion while maintaining context. Users can also accomplish the same goal by shifting selecting objects horizontally. Spatial shift operations are also useful for creating subsets of objects in the visualization. Spatial shift operations maintain relative positions, and thus can be manipulated separately to view patterns within them.

The aim of SDM is to provide users with a high degree of selectivity and object dynamics while manipulating visualizations to analyze and explore diverse information. It does this by giving users freedom in manipulating 2D and 3D objects while providing constraints and feedback to prevent confusion. In support of this, SDM allows flexible control of any object parameter. Many of the selected objects (shown in white) are occluded and it is difficult to analyze them as a set.

Using SDM, selected objects can be elevated over the scene, thus eliminating occlusion while maintaining context. Users can also accomplish the same goal by shifting selecting objects horizontally. Spatial shift operations are also useful for creating subsets of objects in the visualization. Spatial shift operations maintain relative positions, and thus can be manipulated separately to view patterns within them.

Ciro Cattuto wrote a simple piece of code that builds and visualizes a network of inferred semantic relations among the tags that Flickr users attach to their photos. He wrote a Python script that collects tagging info for the public photos of a given user. It does so by using FlickrClient, a Python interface to the Flickr API. The collected information is analyzed using this simple idea: if the presence of tag X and the presence of tag Y are statistically correlated, then X and Y must be somehow "semantically related".

The script focuses on the 50 most used tags of a given user. It loops over pairs of tags and uses a simple correlation heuristic to decide whether two tags are related or not. A graph is built by connecting related tags (nodes) with links (edges). Frequency information is used to measure the strength of a link and a simple conditional probability analysis is used to guess the link orientation, so that "less general" tags point to "more general" ones. The resulting partially directed graph is stored in DOT format and handed over to Graphviz (neato) for visualization.

Nodes correspond to tags, red nodes are the 10 most frequently used tags for the given user, label size increases with tag frequency, and thick edges represent statistically strong links. In this visualization model, strong links act as "elastic strings" pulling nodes close to each other: the closer two nodes are, the stronger is their correlation. Weak links are not shown, in an attempt to keep the graph readable.

2006-05-24: SemaSpace - Graph editor for large knowledge networks

From InfoVis:Wiki

SemaSpace - Graph editor for large knowledge networks

[Offenhuber and Dirmoser, 2006]

SemaSpace is a fast and easy to use graph editor for large knowledge networks, specially designed for the application in non technical sciences and the arts. It creates interactive graph layouts in 2d and 3d by means of a flexible algorithm. The system is powerful enough for the calculation of complex networks and can incorporate additional data such as images, sounds and full texts.

[Offenhuber and Dirmoser, 2006]

Details: http://residence.aec.at/didi/FLweb/

[Offenhuber and Dirmoser, 2006] Dietmar Offenhuber and Gerhard Dirmoser, SemaSpace, Retrieved at: May 24, 2006. http://residence.aec.at/didi/FLweb/

Semiophore is a platform for visualization of databases. Semiophore provides several visual tools to interactively explore databases as well as methods of analysis to filter, organize, classify and qualify information.

These images are from Semiophore Miner, which is a software of analysis and visualization of documents. These documents can be flat or structured (XML or dynamic databases). Semiophore Miner makes it possible to navigate in the documents through networks of collaborations or networks of concepts which are generated by the software. It is mainly used on databases but it can treat any type of document.

Sieve diagram, for representing frequencies in a two-way contingency table.

Riedwyl, H. and Schüpbach, M. (1983). Siebdiagramme: Graphische Darstellung von Kontingenztafeln . Tech. Rep. 12, Institute for Mathematical Statistics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.

Spate of articles on experimental tests of statistical graphical forms: R. von Huhn, F. E. Croxton, J. N. Washburne, USA.

Washburne, J. N. (1927). An experimental study of various graphic, tabular and textual methods of presenting quantitative material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 18:361-376, 465-476.

von Huhn, R. (1927). A discussion of the Eells' experiment. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:31-36.

Croxton, F. E. (1927). Further studies in the graphic use of circles and bars. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:36-39.

Croxton, F. E. and Stein, H. (1932). Graphic comparisons by bars, squares, circles and cubes. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 27:54-60.

Croxton, F. E. and Stryker, R. E. (1927). Bar charts versus circle diagrams. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 22:473-482.

The first large-scale geological map of England and Wales, setting the pattern for geological cartography, and founding stratigraphic geology. Recently called (hyperbolically) "the map that changed the world." (Smith's map was first drawn in 1801, but the final version was not published until 1815.)

Smith, W. (Feb. 1815). A delineation of the strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland; exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fenlands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names . London: John Cary. BL: Maps 1180.(19).

Morton, J. L. (1992). Strata: How William Smith drew the First map of the Earth in 1801 and inspired the Science of Geology. Stroud, England: Tempus Publishing. ISBN 0 7524 1992.

Winchester, S. (2001). The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. New York: Harper Collins.

The scatterplot matrix displays the relationships among all pairs of many variables. This example shows the relation among three measures of social competence, but the data in each plot are stratified by the type of setting. To aid perception of how the relations differ across setting, each subplot is enhanced with a data ellipse showing the strength of the relationship. The diagonal panels show the univariate distribution of each variable, again stratified by type of setting. Color is used effectively to keep the settings visually distinct.

Graphical analysis of periodic variation (in soil temperature), and the first semi-graphic display combining tabular and graphical formats.

Hankins, T. L. (1999). Blood, dirt, and nomograms: A particular history of graphs. Isis, 90:50-80.

Lambert, J. H. (1779). Pyrometrie; oder, vom maasse des feuers und der wärme mit acht kupfertafeln. Berlin.

Invention of precursor of motion-picture camera, recording a series of photographs to study fight of birds, running and walking.

Marey, E.-J. (1873). La machine animale, locomotion terestre et aérienne.

A geographic interface allows a researcher to inspect the scale and coverage of different data sources. By selecting any point on the map, the researcher would see each piece of data that covers the selected region.

Source Description

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.

Data lines that come from the same source are highlighted. Multiple sources could be inspected simultaneously.

Source Description

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.

The Lineage View illustrates how documents are related through citation.

Source Description

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.

Data collected by researchers can be compared by region as well as by content. This visualization shows the buildup of economic, demographic and structural knowledge of Mumbai over a fifty-year period.

Source Description

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.

The crusty pie chart gets a new topping! A pie chart depicts a partition. A Spie chart combines two pie charts to compare partitions. One pie chart is drawn as-is, and serves as the basis for comparison. The other is superimposed on the first, using the same angles for the slices, but different radii, so as to achieve the desired areas.

The example shows road casualties data from Israel. The base pie chart shows the general population parititoned into gender and age groups. The superimposed chart shows the same partitioning for the population of road casualties. Obviously the main age group hit is 20--24, and males are much more often involved in accidents that females.

Reference: D. G. Feitelson, "Comparing Partitions with Spie Charts". Technical Report 2003-87, School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dec 2003. URL: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~feit/papers/Spie03TR.pdf

Irregular polygon ("star plot") to represent multivariate data (with vertices at equally spaced intervals, distance from center proportional to the value of a variable) [but see Georg von Mayr in 1877 [S.78] for first use].

Siegel, J.H., Goldwyn, R.M., and Friedman, H.P. (1971). Pattern and process of the evolution of human septic shock. Surgery, 70:232-245.

Mayr, G.v. (1877). Die Gesetzmäßigkeit im Gesellschaftsleben. Oldenbourg.

It is difficult to compare the means of several groups on many variables. Profile or parallel coordinate plots are often confusing when the curves for different groups cross a great deal. The multivariate star plot shows each of an arbitrary number of variables on radial axes from the origin, here for the means of automobile models, classified by region of manufacture.

In this plot, the variables Price, Gear Ratio and Turning Circle are reflected so larger values represent "better" for all variables; then all variables are first scaled to a 0-1 range. Variables are arranged around the circle by a multivariate effect ordering according to their order on the largest discriminant dimension. The error bars next to each radial axis shows the smallest value of a difference between means required for a (univariate) .05 significant difference.

Starlight is a generic information visualization tool, developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA), that is applicable to a wide range of problems.

In these images, Starlight is being used as an assisting tool to uncover complex file systems. Many information resources are organized into hierarchical structures. Starlight's Hierarchy View can be used to explore the contents of extremely large categorical ontologies such as large, multipart documents, Web directories such as Yahoo, or, as shown here, large file directory structures.

The images show a Hierarchy View of a typical Microsoft Windows "Program Files" directory structure that was mapped out using the Starlight DirCrawler information harvesting utility. Provided with a starting directory, DirCrawler will navigate downwards through all constituent subdirectories, collecting file and directory property information as it goes. Once this process has been completed, the application outputs an XML file that can be used as input to Starlight. The directory structure shown below contains approximately 41,000 individual files organized into about 1400 discrete directories. The individual file glyphs have been color-encoded according to file extension, with image files colored green, text documents blue, computer programming-related files (e.g. source code) orange, etc. Executable files (.exe, .dll, etc.) are shown in yellow.

Starlight is a generic information visualization tool, developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA), that is applicable to a wide range of problems.

Computer network security has become an increasingly pressing issue for many organizations. Starlight can enable network analysts to quickly achieve and maintain an in-depth understanding of network vulnerabilities and security status.

The first image shows a Starlight Network View of computer NIDS data associated with an actual network intrusion incident. In this incident, several unauthorized users gained access to computers on official U.S. Government computer networks. In this example of "edge-oriented" network data visualization, individual NIDS log entries describing suspicious connections among computers are represented as edges in the display, with the nodes representing the individual computers (IP addresses) referenced in the data. This depiction portrays approximately 10,000 connections involving several hundred discrete IP addresses. The edges in this display have been color-encoded according to the "warning level" of the connection, with bright yellow indicating the most critical events. The second image is a closeup view of the suspicious connection (yellow line, left) shown in the preceeding image.

Starlight is a generic information visualization tool, developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA), that is applicable to a wide range of problems.

The first image shows a Starlight Network View representation of the "Information Visualization" Web community. This collection of Web pages was harvested using the Google search engine to retrieve the top 100 ranked pages containing the phrase "information visualization," as well as all pages that link to, or are linked to from, the pages in the query result set. The entire collection consists of approximately 1500 pages. In this view, nodes represent discrete Web pages, and edges represent hyperlink references among the pages. The pages are color-encoded according to their link class, with pages in the original result set colored green, result set inlinks colored blue, and result set outlinks colored yellow. Note that the majority of the result set pages are embedded in the clique (dodecahedra) and cluster (stellated dodecahedra) nodes.

The second image portraits the same Web page collection, now displayed as a Starlight Concept View. It shows conceptual correlations among the contents of the page text. Groups of conceptually related pages are shown displayed in the same cluster, and the clusters are arranged spatially such that clusters that are most similar are spatially adjacent.

Sometimes a map wants to be the forground rather than the background for a data display. Anamorphic maps deform the map for this purpose,This map from the New York Times shows the state of the U.S. presidential race from polls conducted before the 2000 election. In order to show the contribution of each state to a victory by Bush or Gore, each state is sized according to the number of votes it has in the Electoral College, with one square for each vote. A 5-level color scale distinguishes 'safe' from 'leaning', and a bar graph at the bottom shows the totals for all states.

Presented by Archie Tse in a session on Information Graphics at the 2002 Joint Statistical Meetings, Aug. 12, 2002.

Invention of the pie chart, and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.

Playfair, W. (1801). Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe . London: Wallis. Re-published in Wainer, H. and Spence, I. (eds.), The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, 2005, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-85554-3.

CDC map of the incidence of stomach cancer in white males.



Color-coded bivariate matrix to represent two intervally measured variables in a single map (Urban Atlas series)[but see Georg von Mayr in 1874 [Fig. XIX] for first use]- U.S. Bureau of the Census.

U.S. Bureau of the Census (1974). Urban Atlas. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Series GE-80.

Mayr, G. v. (1874). Gutachten Ãœber die Anwendung der Graphischen und Geographischen Methoden in der Statistik. (n.p.).