The Power of Visualization and Real Time Data

Last week I attended the the Webtrends Engage event in New Orleans. I want to share with you one session that relates to one of our concerns at Darwin. Ben Cerveny of Stamen Designspoke on Real Time Data and the Power of Visualization.  before I go there I want to share an image that I felt was a greta visualization. The city is very proud of their New Orleans Saints football team that is going to the Super Bowl for the first time in the 43 years of playing here. On the left is an American flag Saints style that I saw here in the Uptown area. While the colors are not exactly the same as this blog, they do go with it. 

Ben labeled his talk, Shapes in the Cloud. His company is a boutique design firm in San Franciso. He talked about how data visualization affects both the front and back end of data. Webtrends also actively supports innovation on both ends.

Ben went through a series of their projects, beginning with a virtual town hall for Moveon.org. in 2004.  Moveon.org wanted to invite guests to talk about the political issues in the 2004 US election. They wanted some visualization to support the audio on the web site. You logged into the site with your zip code. You would then see a map and see the participants by location. This gave you a sense of the audience. It was dynamic so you could bee to progression of attendees and see the growth.

Next, you could see results from polls related to the speakers. The data would change as the results rolled in, again in the map format so you continued to get a sense of community. This showed the dynamic aspects of data as a medium. Ben said that data can be a mirror and people and communities can use to see more about themselves.

Next, Ben talked about their work with Digg In 2006.  Digg is one of the top news aggregation sites. Ben’s firm formed a partner ship with Digg, to create a site called Digg Labs to show visualizations and the dynamics of interactions.  He showed a display where stories and their supporters are displayed. You can see the evolution of voting patterns. If people vote for more than one story you can see the connections. This visualization is still playing at digglabs.com. These and other visualization show the dynamics of the Digg community and the evolution of stories. You see the explosion of votes as popular stories break. Stack is another digglabs visualization that shows the pattern of story votes over time.

Ben’s firm also did a visual hurricane tracker for MSNBC. The visualization simultaneously shows the effects over time, as well as the present status.  You can drill down from the high level view to get details. There is the live version and the historic version. Both are still live at MSNBC.com./hurricanetracker  You can parse the data to see only level 5 hurricanes, for example. You can patterns of movement.

Trulia Hindsight shows historic views of home construction. Trulia has access to data from tax assessments in the US. You can se the patterns of development as a city emerges. He showed parts of San Francisco from 1848 to 2003 so you can see how the city grew. The process of creating the visualization helped the Trulia data people to better understand what was within their data.

Ben next talked about Crimespotting in Oakland. This project shows where crimes occur in Oakland. They took data form the city web site and then rebuild how it is visualized to make it more understandable. They did this as test case. You can see when crimes happen, as well as where. You can parse the data by different dimensions such as time of day.

The last project is SFMOMA ArtScope to provide immersive art browsing. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they put the entire catalog from the museum into a site. They made it into a slippery map format (like Google Maps) that allows you to move over images. You can see paintings as they were acquired over time. You can the patterns of collection. I wish the Boston MFA had this application.

Ben and his firm do some very creative work that does demonstrate the power of good visualizations.