Visualization

Visualization

by George Siemens -
Number of replies: 8
Visualization is an effective way of distilling messages down to a few key patterns and then use those patterns to compare other similar messages. Consider this wordle of state of the union addresses: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2011/01/26/State_of_the_union_2011.pdf

Wordles are somewhat useless - they provide little emphasis on the tone of an information source - i.e. "economy" could be used to mean positive job growth, not negative. A wordle doesn't provide much help in this regard. You have to know a bit of the context in order for wordles to be useful. Some of the tools within IBM's manyeyes are more helpful as they track word patterns, use, and connectedness.
In reply to George Siemens

Re: Visualization

by George Siemens -
just came across this visualization: http://neoformix.com/2011/SOTU2011.html
In reply to George Siemens

Re: Visualization

by Laurence Cuffe -
That's cool, I like the way the color coding allows you to see that the structure of the speech remains similar. I would assume that humans classify the sentences by category?
In reply to George Siemens

Re: Visualization

by Michael Paskevicius -
I've managed to visualize a chat room dialogue using NodeXL. It certainly is more telling then what we can get from simply looking at the chat log. However one must go deeper into coding the utterances to understand what exactly is going on. So in a sense it is as superficial as a wordle, but does show the connectedness and engagement based on user roles.

You can see the visualization here: http://www.bluelightdistrict.org/wp/?p=4596
In reply to George Siemens

Re: Visualization

by merce galan -
A few months ago I tried an application that linked the friends of Facebook on a wheel, where moving the mouse it activates the links of the nodes connected.

Statistically I think it isn't a lot of functionality, but aesthetically not bad.

http://www.media-lab.es/info/?p=1263

Greetings
In reply to merce galan

Re: Visualization

by Nicola Avery -
I have been using ManyEyes for a few years, one at Surrey we used a couple of years ago was a mini-project to compare market data and market news to explore relationships.

From what I remember, gathering the news was mostly a cut and paste job and a 100+ page doc of multiple blogs, comments, online newspaper articles.

Some examples of the original mindmap before we started, the blog text (very waffly) and a topic center on Many Eyes.

Also a Density Design presentation on visualization and design.



In reply to merce galan

Re: Visualization

by Michael Paskevicius -
@merce what tool did you use to do that?

I used NodeXL to visualize some twitter activity from the #LAK11 hashtag. It is not quite as interactive but still very telling!

http://www.bluelightdistrict.org/wp/?p=4606
In reply to Michael Paskevicius

Re: Visualization

by merce galan -
Hi Michael,
It's an apps call FriendWheel, is within Facebook. Enter the name in the search Facebook. It has several views.
Greetings
Mercè