Category: Where: CMU and Lawrence Livermore National Lab Implementation: network Date: 2008
We present Graphite, a system that allows the user to visually construct a query pattern, finds both its exact and approximate matching subgraphs in large attributed graphs, and visualizes the matches. For example, in a social network where a person’s occupation is an attribute, the user can draw a ‘star’ query for “finding a CEO who has interacted with a Secretary, a Manager, and an Accountant, or a structure very similar to this”. Graphite uses the G-Ray algorithm to run the query against a user-chosen data graph, gaining all of its benefits, namely its high speed, scalability, and its ability to find both exact and near matches. Therefore, for the example above, Graphite tolerates indirect paths between, say, the CEO and the Accountant, when no direct path exists. Graphite uses fast algorithms to estimate node proximities when finding matches, enabling it to scale well with the graph database size.
Category: Lexical / Text Where: DMI Boston Implementation: network Date: 2005
Jellyfish visualizes an encyclopedia of the arts. The project should be seen as an experiment, which deals with a dynamic interface. The purpose was to remove a static, conventional design and to achieve a playful interface. The application was developed in Processing and uses an XML database to update content. 2005
Category: Survey Where: University of Maryland, College Park. Implementation: mixed Date: 2005
A survey of Internet Visualization Tools
Viz4All is a survey of visualization tools examined by graduate students participating in the spring 2005 Information Visualization class at the University of Maryland, College Park. Our criteria for visualizations on this website: are designed for use by the general public (not specialists); present practical, useful, and possibly entertaining information; with an interactive interface that gives users control over the display.
Category: text / lexical Where: University of Washington.
Implementation
network, temporal, hierarchical
Date: NA
Eigenfactor is a non-commercial academic research project by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.
Interactive visualizations based on the Eigenfactor™ Metrics and hierarchical clustering to explore emerging patterns in citation networks. A cooperation between the Eigenfactor Project (data analysis) and Moritz Stefaner (visualization).
The visualization is dynamic, and generated with Flare (prefuse's successor).
The map visualization puts journals, which frequently cite each other, closer together. You can drag the white magnification lens around to enlarge a part of the map for closer inspection. Clicking one of the nodes will highlight all its connections. If a journal is selected, the node sizes represent the relative amount of citation flow (incoming and outgoing) with respect to the selection; otherwise, they are scaled by their Eigenfactor™ Score. Map calculated with Cytoscape, visualization built with flare
We use a subset of the citation data from Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports 1997–2005. The complete data aggregate, at the journal level, approximately 60,000,000 citations from more than 7000 journals over the past decade. For an interesting subset, we select journals ordered by their Article Influence™ in 2005, but include no more than 25 journals from a single field. To make the subset coherent, we make sure that selected journals are included all years and that we cover the 10 journals with highest Eigenfactor™ score. To cluster the networks, we use the information-theoretic method presented in Maps of information flow reveal community structure in complex networks (PNAS 105, 1118 (2008)), which can reveal regularities of information flow across directed and weighted networks.
Category: text / lexical Where: NA. Implementation: network Date: Present
The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that allows you to discover the connections between words in a visually captivating display. Written in Java.
Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Implementation: network Date: Present
Watch a great presentation by Hans Rosling on world statistics on TED. He uses very clean, simple graphs (Flash, very likely) showing the variation of world data vary as a function of time. The message is extremely convincing.
Category: Geographic Where: Politecnico di Milano Implementation: geographic Date: NA
CityMurmur is a Web application that periodically scans a pool of news sources, blogs, and online newspapers searching for references to local streets, points of interest and areas of the city. using this information the application is then able to plot topographical and semantic maps of the city according to the topic discussed by the news source( culture, society,...), the source's topology (blogs, online newspapers), and its scale (local media, regional media). </i>
Category: Geographic Where: University of Maryland Implementation: network Date: NA
Taken from "Visualizing Graphs as Trees: Plant a seed and watch it grow", Bongshin Lee, Cynthia Sims Parr, Catherine Plaisant, Benjamin B. Bederson. http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2005-23/2005-23.html
Abstract. TreePlus is a graph browsing technique based on a tree-style layout. It shows the missing graph structure using interaction techniques and enables users to start with a specific node and incrementally explore the local structure of graphs. We believe that it supports particularly well tasks that require rapid reading of labels.
Biodiversity Heritage Library, The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Category: Geographic Where: Politecnico di Milano Implementation: network Date: NA
During [his] time at AT&T Labs, which coincidently has a great information visualization group, [he] started [to] think about how to visualizing something as massive as Wikipedia. With roughly 1.5 million articles (vertices) and tens of millions of article links (edges), a comprehensive visualization package would have to found or built. After playing around with GraphViz, but getting frustrated with layout limitations, I decided on the latter option: build!
PubNet: a flexible system for visualizing literature derived networks, reviewed by Shawn M Douglas,1 Gaetano T Montelione,2 and Mark Gersteincorresponding, author1,3
Abstract: We have developed PubNet, a web-based tool that extracts several types of relationships returned by PubMed queries and maps them into networks, allowing for graphical visualization, textual navigation, and topological analysis. PubNet supports the creation of complex networks derived from the contents of individual citations, such as genes, proteins, Protein Data Bank (PDB) IDs, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, and authors. This feature allows one to, for example, examine a literature derived network of genes based on functional similarity.
Category: text / lexical Where:Stanford Implementation: network Date: 2009
"We present Vispedia (live at vispedia.stanford.edu), a system that reduces the cost of data integration, enabling casual users to build ad hoc visualizations of Wikipedia data. Users can browse Wikipedia, select an interesting data table, then interactively discover, integrate, and visualize additional related data on-demand through a search interface and a query recommendation engine. This is accomplished through a fast path search algorithm over a semantic graph derived from Wikipedia. Vispedia also supports exporting the augmented data tables produced for use in more traditional visualization systems. We believe that these techniques begin to address the "long tail" of visualization by allowing a wider audience to visualize a broader class of data."
Where: Los Alamos National Laboratory Implementation: network Date: 2009
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world's first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services. The research, led by Johan Bollen, appears this week in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).
The GeoVISTA Center and the Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University
Implementation: multi-dimensional Date: 2007
A visual tool to explore the relationships in the Internet Movie Database. Implemented with Improvise.
Cinegraph is an interactive visualization for exploring and analyzing the InfoVis 2007 contest data set derived from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). By combining two complementary visual interaction techniques, cross-filtered views and attribute relationship graphs, Cinegraph supports a wide variety of general and highly focused analytic tasks. Users can express complex lines of questions in the form of rapid sequences of simple interactions. Designed and built in a little over two days by a single visualization designer using the Improvise visualization environment, Cinegraph provides high-dimensional interactive drill-down capability into the people, genres, awards, release dates, and box office characteristics of movies described in the database, using ancillary photographs of people, images of movie posters, and icons of movie genres to enhance the interaction process. (from http://www.cs.ou.edu/~weaver/improvise/examples/cinegraph)
Morse-Smale Complex, and the visualization of "big data"
Category: 3D, Scientific, algorithms Where: UC Davis Implementation:3D Date: 2009
Basking in Big Data [1], or how Visualization software makes viewing and interacting with enormous data sets practical without a supercomputer.
Recently [...] researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they have developed software that makes analysis and visualization of huge data sets possible without the aid of a supercomputer. The researchers' algorithm (the Morse-Smale Complex algorithm) slices up data into more manageable chunks, then stitches it back together on the fly, so that the data can be manipulated in three dimensions, all on a computer with the power and capacity of a high-end laptop. (from Technology Review, http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21976/?a=f )
Slides of presentation at VisWeek 09 [www.idav.ucdavis.edu/~garth/vis09-tutorial/pdfs/childs.pdf here].
Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan
Implementation: 2D Date: 2008
Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results, generated by M. E. J. Newman, U. Michigan.
The map on the left is geographically correct. The map on the right shows the states deformed in such a way that their area is now proportional to the number of electoral votes they carry.
The author is a co-author of the Atlas of the Real World (Hardcover) published by by Daniel Dorling (Author), Mark Newman (Author), Anna Barford (Author), published Oct. 2008.
The University of New South Wales - Sydney Australia
Implementation: network, 3D Date: 2009
SKYRAILS is a 3D OpenGL visualization software.
Skyrails is a social network (or any graph really) visualization system. It has a built in programming language for processing (as far as visualisation attributes goes) the graph and its attributes. The system is not only aimed at expert users though, because through the scripting languages menus can be built and the system can be used by any users.
The main distinguishing point of the system comes from the built in scripting language, the added flexibility of how to represent attributes (nodes can be binded to planes and spheres based on their attributes) and the scriptability of the user interface system. This makes skyrails ideal for creating presentations targeted at the average users. (from http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~wyos/skyrails/)
PixlCloud (founded by Raffael Marty, 1011 23rd Street #20, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA
Implementation: misc. Date: 2009
Below are some graphs taken from the dedicated to visualizing security information.
The SecViz portal is meant for people that are working on log analysis, log mining and especially on visualization of security related data to exchange, discuss, and comment on techniques, methods, parsers, and sample graphs.
The maintainer of the site, Raffael Marty (ram at secviz dot org), is the founder of PixlCloud, a visualization in the cloud company. He has written about security data visualization for various books and blogs and also talks at security conferences around the world on the topic of data visualization. He is also the author of AfterGlow, an open source tool for data visualization. (from http://secviz.org/content/about)
Geo Tagging an Attack
The INAV software package for visualizing connection information in real time
API Calls and Imported Symbols of Nepenthes Download Binary Files
24 hours of firewall logs plotted by source port over time
Tenable Network Security's Security Center includes a 3D visualization tool
Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. The original prefuse toolkit provides a visualization framework for the Java programming language. The prefuse flare toolkit provides visualization and animation tools for ActionScript and the Adobe Flash Player.
Prefuse supports a rich set of features for data modeling, visualization, and interaction. It provides optimized data structures for tables, graphs, and trees, a host of layout and visual encoding techniques, and support for animation, dynamic queries, integrated search, and database connectivity. Prefuse is written in Java, using the Java 2D graphics library, and is easily integrated into Java Swing applications or web applets. Prefuse is licensed under the terms of a BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. (from http://prefuse.org/)
Check out the movie and the gallery of visualizations implemented with this toolkit.
Interactive 2-D Graph of word relationships in Dictionary (Prefuse)
NearWord is a free visual synonym thesaurus, based on the WordNet dictionary and the Prefuse visualization toolkit, using Flash-based force-directed graphs.
Category: Lexical/Text Where: U. Toronto, Can Implementation: 2D Date: 2006 to present
DocuBurst is the first visualization of document content which takes advantage of the human-created structure in lexical databases. We use an accepted design paradigm to generate visualizations which improve the usability and utility of WordNet as the backbone for document content visualization. A radial, space-filling layout of hyponymy (IS-A relation) is presented with interactive techniques of zoom, filter, and details-on-demand for the task of document visualization. The techniques can be generalized to multiple documents. A technical report on this project is available in PDF as well as a short poster abstract from the IEEE Information Visualization Symposium 2006.
Another site dedicated to collecting stunning examples of visualization.
Inspired by Lev Manovich's definition of "information aesthetics", this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization. More specifically, it collects projects that represent data or information in original or intriguing ways. Since its conception in December 2004, several other terms have been introduced within the academic world for similar phenomena, ranging from 'Information Aesthetic Visualization' over 'Casual Information Visualization' to 'Artistic Data Visualization' .
Category: Business / Stock Market Where: Seattle, WA Implementation: NA Date: 2006
newvisual is a product of IntellectSpace Corporation a company that offers strategy and risk analysis solutions to investment banking and private equity sectors. The company develops and operates a Web based qualitative analysis system that analyzes and represents regulatory filings and corporate announcements. IntellectSpace was founded in 2003 and is based in Seattle, Washington.
Category: Social Network Where: NA Implementation: network Date: 2009
Wikicompany is a free content licensed ("Creative Commons: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0"), worldwide business directory that anyone can edit.
Creating a new company profile is easy, fast and free.
Wikicompany profiles are now also part of the exciting Linking Open Data and DBPedia projects. These projects provide free, structured data sets and software tools for developing innovative Semantic Web applications.
Category: Historical Where: Westford, MA 01886 Implementation: prints Date: 2009
We create informational graphics that tell stories about subjects, time periods and events. Our purpose is to inform and entertain you with intense content embedded in an elegant design.
Category: Survey Where: SmashingMagazine Implementation: NA Date: 2007
Founded in September 2006, Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in Web development. We try to convince you not with the quantity but with the quality of the information we present. We hope that makes us different. Smashing Magazine is, and always has been, independent. (from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/about-us/ )
This is a 3D-Graph visualization tool created/maintained by Tamara Munzer's research group at Stanford. It is open source and interactive, written in C++ and OpenGL.
NYT articles 8/8/31 acknowledging new ways for people to display information. It's really an article on IBM's Many-Eyes (http://many-eyes.com/)
Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said PatHanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”
“The great fun of information visualization,” Ben Shneiderman says, “is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”
Category: Lexical/Text Where: NA Implementation: Graph, 2D Date: 2008
Conflate.net shows a Processing visualization applet where the user can control the number of books shows (as circles) and the threshold defining whether they are similar or not.
Category: Lexical/Text Where: U. Vienna Implementation: network, 2D Date: 2007
A library for exploring graphically graphs. Written in Processing, created and maintained by the University of Vienna.
Using the transcripts of Bill Gates' keynote from CES 2007 and Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld 2007 (via Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog) the author created this relational tagcloud using Rhizome Navigation.
Where: UC Davis Implementation: 2D, 3D, network Date: 2008
Code-Swarm is a visualization technique to show the evolution of a software project under CVS as it is updated, modified, and as it evolves under the influence of many contributors/programmers.
“A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: ‘This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.’”
“DNA Collage 1” is on the cover of the new issue of Connecticut Medicine. Dr. Ruaño called it a “snapshot” of variations in the genome sequences of 62 people, one to a column, from blood samples taken in clinical studies at the hospital.
Category: Newsprint Where: NYT Implementation: NA Date: 06/01/2008
Visuals
Burtin was one of many designer exiles who fled the Nazis and Fascists, including the Bauhaus teachers Herbert Bayer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy […] Burtin was the art director of Fortune magazine in the late ’40s, responsible for introducing abstract and conceptual art covers. Burtin’s most impressive contribution was the marriage of science and design.
After a recent spate of graphic designer biographies, this detailed monograph is definitely overdue. Burtin’s virtually forgotten work, like the exhibition “Metabolism — the Cycle of Life,” prefigures the interaction design practiced today on the Web and reveals just how entertaining well-articulated graphic and exhibition design about science can be.
The work of W. Bradford Paley, associated with Columbia University. A different view of a whole book in one graphic visualization. Visually pleasing. Harder to figure out how to make use of it.
Category: Lexical/text Where: NA Implementation: 2D Date: 2008
Digg Arc displays stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail people as they Digg stories across topics. Stories with more Diggs make thicker arcs.
This is done with processing, and truly interactive. As the arrow key is moved left or right, we move by one year backward or foreward, respectively, and see in red the words used the year before, and in white the words of the current year. Cool…
The link contains an interesting essay, reproduced below:
The {Sorry} State We Are In
by Brad Borevitz
The triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity–call it the society of the spectacle, call it what you will. The change has certainly not gone unobserved. And yet, we are likely to blinker our awareness of the situation–and imagine that the mechanisms of our governance continue unaffected–that the institutions of democracy are somehow untouched by these changes. But how can this possibly be the case?
A democratic system of government depends on communicative practices that are founded on rhetoric: an art of persuasion. This implies a public sphere as the ground of a competitive exchange of argument and counter argument. Reason theoretically rules such a domain, where syllogistic conventions determine the outcome of a competition of ideas based on the strength of evidence and the logical coherence of their exposition.
What has displaced this rhetorical arena is a screen on which assertions are projected. It may be that these assertions compete for attention, but they don’t entertain argument or tolerate critique. Assertions are immune from denigration based on counterfactual evidence, or the revelation of faulty logic. Competition in this environment is a matter of precedence, authority, style, volume, frequency, and ultimately saturation.
Contemporary political ideas, which take the form of memes circulating in the soup of our media saturated world, are formally equivalent to the fragments of iconic identity circulating as agents of corporate entities, the brands. Politics is branding, the media practice of producing identity as awareness and desire, through the deployment of declarative language and image.
Not only have commercial interests produced a scarcity of actual public space by their domination of the landscape and their occupation of the commons, they have gained almost total control over the virtual spaces of communication, and colonized the language of political discourse itself.
In this atmosphere, the public debate over ideas is obsolete, if not impossible. The significance of such a change is immense. In Benjaminian terms, politics enters the realm of the aesthetic, a situation symptomatic of fascism.
How is it that we have arrived at this state? Why are we so surprised as we wake now to the nightmare? After all, here in the U.S., the president has been informing us of the state of the union from the year the constitution was ratified. Were we not listening to the message–not reading in this text the signs of transformation? When was it that the words addressed to us changed from having a rhetorical significance to an iconic one? When was it that the words last demanded our understanding, and when did they come to simply demand that we buy in?
Category: Lexical/text Where: NYT Implementation: 3D Date: 2006
This was done for the NYT, 3 Dec. 2006. The article is “Rewiring the Spy”. This is done in Processing and shows the connections existing between words in a government database dealing with terrorism.
Category: Business/Stock Market Where: NYT Implementation: 2D Date: 2008
May 20th, 2008 by admin
Interesting article exhibiting a very “organic” chart showing influence of various factors in the inflation.
Note the scale given at the top, showing the relationship between color and change in price. The graph itself is hierarchic, with 8 different categories (apparel, health care, etc…), and each is divided up into sub categories shown as blobs of various sizes, the size being proportional to the part of spending.
The graph is interactive on the NYT web site, and gives more info about a blob on mouse-over.
“Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct”
The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.
Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.
Design and the Elastic Mind
May 12th, 2008 by admin
Paul Antonelli, the curator of the exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” speaks to Charlie Rose in a 1-hour interview. Great stuff!
Just found this while looking for ways to represent the CS curriculum as a graph. I think our direction using Processing is good, and I don’t want to go back to Graphviz, but looking at ways people are using graphing packages to show relationships is interesting, no matter what package they use.
Today’s NYT (2/24/08) shows an interesting graph of the money made by different movies in 2007. It’s an interesting way to show time-variation of several tens of quantities.
The graph is interactive, as the mouse is moved over the different movies, some information is displayed, as well as the length of their duration. http://www.nytimes.com/
Interesting links related to Processing
February 22nd, 2008 by admin
Yahoo Burst
Similarity
Valence
(Note: I will keep adding more links as the time comes, so please keep checking this post often
So here is a link to Microsoft Silverlight’s “Showcase” page where some Silverlight applications are available for demo. I don’t want to initially create a large web application but Silverlight graphics can be inserted inline with HTML code easily.
First go to the site TheyRule.net and play with the system.
Select “Load Map”/”Popular” and pick an entry. You will see a network of connections appearing. The network shows the people that belong to different boards of companies. As you move your mouse over some of the entries you are given a menu to search or delete the item. Also very neat, you can ckick on an item and move it around with the mouse while retaining the existing connections.
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