Week 10

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

By Vitaly Friedman
August 2nd, 2007

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?
Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.




Below are some of the images that I took from the article:


Mindmaps: Trendmap 2007








Displaying news: Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. The size of data blocks is defined by their popularity at the moment.






Digg Stack: Digg stories arrange themselves as stack as users digg them. The more diggs a story gets, the larger is the stack.




Displaying Data: Amaztype, a typographic book search, collects the information from Amazon and presents it in the form of keyword you’ve provided. To get more information about a given book, simply click on it.





Time Magazine uses visual hills (spikes) to emphasize the density of American population in its map.








Comments

Personally I feel that with all these nice graphics, it make it very attractive for viewers to see but of course, the visualization has to bring across the message clearly, so these graphics should not be too complicated and difficult for readers to read and understand.