Category: Visualization

Data Analytics’ Next Big Feat: Sarcasm Detection

Slashdot has a story about Data Analytics’ Next Big Feat: Sarcasm Detection. The BBC article that this draws from says the French company Spotter has algorithms for 29 different languages and that they can “identify sentiment up to an 80% accuracy rate.”

 

A screen shot from Spotter shows a tool running on an iPad with a word cloud for exploration and selection tools.

The same Slashdot story sent me also to a Wall Street Journal story about how the Obama 2012 campaign used Salesforce for sentiment analysis on email coming into the campaign.

Visualizing Collaboration

Ofer showed me a interactive visualization of the collaboration around a Wikipedia article. The visualization shows the edits (deletions/insertions) over time in different ways. It allows one to study distributed collaborations (or lack thereof) around things like a Wikipedia article. The ideas can be applied to visualizing any collaboration for which you have data (as often happens when the collaboration happens through digital tools that record activity.)

His hypothesis is that theories about how site-specific teams collaboration don’t apply to distributed teams. Office teams have been studied, but there isn’t a lot of research on how voluntary and distributed teams work.

World Development Indicators – Google Public Data Explorer

Ryan sent me a link to World Development Indicators – Google Public Data Explorer. This is a great visual data explorer with lots of data already available. It looks like the Gapminder Trendanalyzer, which Google bought in 2007. (Gapminder is now focused on keeping statistical data up-to-date and producing related media.) In Google Public Data you can search for datasets and then play with the type of visualization and so on. I’m struck by how this model of weaving datasets and tools together works so simply with the tools adapting to the datasets. I wonder if we could do something like this for texts?

Gapminder’s Hans Rosling has a TED talk on Stats that reshape your worldview that is worth watching where he talks about preconceptions we have about the world. He is really good at showing how much things have changed so that preconceptions true in the 1960s are not longer valid.

As Megan Garber explains in Dataviz, democratized: Google opens Public Data Explorer, one of the things Google has done is to now allow us to upload our data too, so this ceases to be such a passive interpretation tool. The trick is the Dataset Publishing Language that lets uploaders describe their data so the Public Data Explorer can present it properly.

U.S. Gun Killings in 2010

Jennifer sent me a link to an animated visualization of U.S. Gun Killings in 2010. The visualization shows the years lost by people being killed with guns. It animates their lives as arcs that change at the moment of death, but continue so that you can see how long they might have lived.

This visualization shows how animation can add to a visualization. In this case it adds drama and a sense of the individual lives. In many cases animation hides information as much as it shows like a slide show that hides one slide to show another. I’m convinced animated visualizations can do more, but haven’t come across that many.

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

Emilie pointed me to an NPR strory on mining mood in 20th century books, Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century. This story draws on a very readable article The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books in PLOS One. The article reports on a study of “mood” or sentiment over time in literature. The used the Google Ngram data. I like how they report first and then discuss methodology at the end.

They mention support from an interesting EU funded project TrendMiner. TrendMiner is developing real-time multi-lingual analysis tools.

Continue reading The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation

Luciano sent me this link to a stunning multipoint touch installation at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, The Cube at QUT – world’s biggest multitouch installation. I like how they have the touch at ground level, but the screen extends up.

I note that the Cube folk also have a Lego Education Learning Centre. I’m doubly envious.

Visual Music

In Dublin I heard DAH student Maura McDonnell present on Visual Music (her blog), which is her PdD research area. Visual Music is one term among many of experiments in light and sound and her blog is a nice collection of resources on this new media form.

From her blog I learned that there is a also a Center for Visual Music that has documentation and an online store.

Maura’s own work can be seen online, see Silk Chroma. The image above is taken from the Vimeo video.