Historical Visualizations

Matt Jensen of NewsBlip has pointed me to work he and others are doing on historical visualization. See, for example, the technical report on Semantic Timelines that he wrote. Historical Visualizations, by David Staley in the JAHC: Journal of the Association for History and Computing (vol. III, no. 3, Nov. 2000) surveys the ways visualization is used in history from concepts to timelines.
Another similar project is the Temporal Modelling project led by Johanna Drucker. She and Bethany Nowviskie have been working on visual forms of knowledge production. See their Prototype Designs for a temporal vocabulary which I blogged earlier at 3D Timelines.

flowerGarden

flowerGarden by greg judelman is a “web-baed software application, produced in Flash, for real-time soica network and conversation visualization.” It produces a TextArc like visualization of people in conversation and concepts they discussed. Judelman uses a flower of petals for people in a way that makes the visualization look like a garden of words with flowers blossoming. This is thanks to Bethany Nowviskie.

Dogpile: Search Comparison Visualization

StÈfan has a blog entry on Dogpile Search Comparitor tool which produces a venn diagram of the results from different search engines. The interface, however, has a fatal flaw. You can’t link to the resulting sites that are common to more than one search engine (and presumably are the ones you want). The little pills in the middle – which stand for the shared results link to a Dogpile listing, not to the resulting site itself.

Escape Route

Escape Route is a “photographic travelogue” which shows a 3D itinerary or 2D itinerary of locations for which there are photos. The itineraryies are mapped onto 3d or 2d globes space. There are neat animations for when you collapse from 3d to 2d. I’m so intrigued by the navigation interface I haven’t really looked at the snaps. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.

Gospel Spectrum

jesusviz.jpg Gospel Spectrum Beta is a New Testament visualization tool that allows you to see the events of Jesus’ life described in the gospels and whether the gospels are in harmony. The vertical lines are verses on an event. The colours are the different gospel writers. Zooming in eventually allows you to see the full text. Quite a nice custom visualization. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.