(Sparkline of US deficit over time) Sparklines: theory and practice is a thread in Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T. forum (which is a great place to follow discussions on design issues.) The thread starts with images of some pages from Tufte’s new book, Beautiful Evidence (2006) on sparklines which are defined as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”. The sparkline at the beginning of this entry is from the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library. Another source of sparkline tools is Bissantz sparkline tools. Thanks to Shawn for this link.
So how can sparklines be woven into text anlysis environments? Small distribution graphs could be included with lists of word or KWIC displays in tools like the TAPoRware tools.
Category: Visualization
Download Pertinence Summarizer – Text Mining Solutions
PertinenceMining.com is a French company that has a number of neat text processing products built on their KENiA or “Knowledge Extraction and Notification Architecture.” One their products is Connivences.info which produces maps of “actors” in the news with weighted lines to indicate relationships.
Another interesting tool is their Google + Pertinence Summarizer that enhances the results from Google with a “Summarize” button which splits the linked page into sentences and tries to rank their pertinence to the document so you can choose to see only the most pertinent. The interface took me a while – I’m not sure it works.
mandalabrot.net
mandalabrot.net is the home of kiddphunk (Ian Timourian) and his visualizations, experiments and remixes. He has a number of Context Free Design Grammar experiments. Timourian also has a photo kiddphunk site with an doubled way of showing images.
Thanks to Johnny R. for pointing me to this collection of “Explorations of Generative Art, Mathematics, Algorithmic Design and the Beauty of Life / Vol 1”.
visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. (From the About page.)
I discovered this through the del.icio.us.discover project. We need a comparable collection of text visualization projects.
RefViz: Bibliographic Visualization
RefViz is a visualization tool from Thomson Researchsoft (who also publish EndNote and ProCite). RefViz lets you visualize “galaxies” of bibliographic references showing clusters of references by keywords. It also has a matrix view where you can see how keywords correlate.
Save time and learn more about what is happening in the literature with RefViz. With this powerful text analysis and visualization software program, you get an intuitive framework for exploring reference collections based on content. (From the Product Info page.)
The Pool: Float Your Ideas
The Pool is a networked collaboration environment that presents a visualization of proposed projects distributed by approval and recognition. The idea is that people can propose ideas, approaches to ideas, release implementations of the approaches and then reviews. I guess that as ideas mature they will migrate from the lower left to upper rights. It only works on selected browsers.
This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (From “learn more” -> “purpose”)
Websites as Graphs
Tim Russell sent me a link to a tool that creates a visualization of Websites as graphs – an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet. This link will generate a graph of the McMaster site if you have Java. There is also a link to examples on flickr – Flickr: Photos tagged with websitesasgraphs.
SIMWeb
SIMWeb is one of the first web text visualization tools I made. It visually represents the results from Correspondence Analysis on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
I blogging this partly because I keep on losing the location of the site.
Mandala Browser
My colleague StÈfan Sinclair has recently set up a site for the Mandala: Rich Prospect Browser text visualization project that he leads. The current prototype was programmed in Flash, but he is reimplementing it in Java. It is one of the more original ideas for visualization that I have seen in a while and builds on Stan Ruecker’s ideas for rich prospect browsing where you can see some representation of the whole of your evidence (the prospect) while manipulating the details. StÈfan has also been working with ideas of direct manipulation of that whole. In Mandala you create dimensions based on criteria (author = X, Y, or Z) that act as attractors.
CNET Story Visualizations
CNET News.com has two interesting types of visualization available alongside their stories.
The Big Picture is bubble graph that shows links out from the story you are looking at.
What’s Hot shows the hot stories in coloured boxes where size shows popularity and colour shows how recent the story is.
It’s not clear how they measure “hot”. Is a cool story hot?