VisualPoint

“Not so long ago, information visualization in the digital humanities rested firmly on the general principles of clarity and brevity typified by Edward Tufte and utilized not only in generic data visualization but also spatial data …

The problem with this conceptualization of information visualization is that works like Tufte’s are dominated by the expectation that such objects be immediately comprehensible to a lay audience.  These are the infographics of such growing popularity and are meant for busy media consumers and executive summaries.”

“In the JunkCharts Trifecta checkup, we reserve a corner for “data”. The data used in a chart must be in harmony with the question being addressed, as well as the chart type being selected.”

 

“When people think about data, they often think cleaning the data, processing the data but what comes before that is collecting the data — specifically, collecting data that directly address the question at hand.”

“Over the last few years I’ve created a few popular visualizations, a lot of duds, and I’ve learned a few lessons along the way.

For my latest analysis of where Facebook users go on vacation, I decided to document the steps I follow to build my visualizations . It’s a very rough guide, these are just stages I’ve learned to follow by trial and error, but following these guidelines is a good way to start if you’re looking to create your first visualization.”

“Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who’ve never tried it before.

 

Below are a collection of resources to get you going down the information architecture and data visualization path. Whether you just want to become more familiar with infographics and data visualizations for occasional use or are thinking of making it a career, the resources below will surely come in handy. There are also some beautiful examples and more roundups to see even more fantastic graphics.”

Babar Suleman discusses the 7 Rules of Great Infographic Design (RT @columnfive: How to Strike the Elusive Balance between Data and Visualization

 They started out as a social media experiment and then suddenly everyone wanted a piece.

A couple years back, if you dropped the word ‘Infographic’ or ‘Dataviz’ in a conversation, you would have been greeted by a good number of confused looks even if you were among other web designers.

Today, so many infographics have gone viral that it’s practically impossible to ignore them. You’ll find them tweeted by your friends who want to share an interesting new find, promoted by companies eager to display their growth trends and utilized by even the White House for its progress reports.

“One of the most common question I am asked these days is what sort of data visualisation I like the most.

It is clearly a very open-ended question and one that is hard to satisfactorily answer on the spot without later thinking more deeply and wishing to refine your response. Indeed, forming a pure and consistent conviction about what you like is difficult (for some) especially in such a rapidly growing and evolving field like data visualisation.”

“We live in a mediated world, where everything from television and internet usage to snack food purchases is measured, quantified and dissected. The challenge is to make data tell a story, conveying what’s most important effectively and efficiently. Nielsen, a global leader in measurement and information, is searching for innovators – passionate designers at the intersection of art and science – to compete in creating the most insightful, beautiful and intuitive visualizations of some of our data.”

“300.000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by their journeys could be compressed into one short animation, what would it look like? What would someone seeing it be able to learn, if anything?

Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing 8 million tax records from 2006 and 2007 to track changes in postal codes.”

 ”Data is only as good as the way people comprehend it and put it to work. The field of data visualization presents data in forms that make more sense. One of the pioneers in modern data visualization is Tableau Software, which was spun out of the work of Pat Hanrahan as his team of Ph.D.’s at Stanford University.”

A few days after my post on indispensable visualization I received an email from Prof. Georges Grinstein (what an honor! he is one of the fathers of visualization) asking for explanations about my use of the word “visualization consumerism.

Here is the guidance. In the following, I propose a number of rules and factors you need to take into account when choosing a visualization tool. Furthermore I introduce a number of “staple visualization tools”: established tools which you can make great visualizations with.

“What do you think is next in the world of infographics and data visualization?

 Ross Crooks, cofounder of the infographics firm Column Five, rounds up some of the most interest”ing trends impacting the discipline.”