Datavisualization.chShowcases

Research findings in data visualization by Christian Siegrist & Benjamin Wiederkehr

Candeo is a visual dashboard to monitor potential risks with hazardous and toxic substances. This was our bachelor's project. We realized and implemented it for the risk-management specialist department at the university of Berne, Switzerland.
DataZoo is a repository for datasets freely available to the public.
MM Construct is a base application for any Flash AS3 project that uses the ModestMaps library.

Thoughts, opinions and ideas about data visualization nourish the discussion and may ultimately lead to a better general understanding. We invite you to participate in the discussion and express your opinion in the comments.
Total Posts: 16
Candeo is a visual dashboard to monitor potential risks with hazardous and toxic substances. This was our bachelor's project. We realized and implemented it for the risk-management specialist department at the university of berne, Switzerland.
Total Posts: 46
Most visualizations are dedicated to make sense of the underlying data. Therefore we document data sources ranging from APIs to publicly available datasets.
Total Posts: 17
Data visualization is still a niche and thus networking a crucial part of the daily work. Events are great to stay up-to-date with current developments as well as meeting peers and cultivate connections.
Total Posts: 12
Inspiration lies in everything. From art to everyday things – from music to stories. Inspiration is one of the most important things if you want to come up with new ideas on how to visualize causes, effects and dependencies.
Total Posts: 7
These are posts that are related to the website in general and have not imperatively something to do with datavsiualization.
Total Posts: 12
There are super smart people working in the field of data visualzation and explore new ways to gather, mine, refine, display or beautify data. We think it's time to shine some light not only on their work but also their background, work processes and work philosophies.
Total Posts: 9
QuickNotes are short, bitesized pieces of information. Think of it as a moderated and enriched version of our dashboard.
Total Posts: 67
Presenting new and interesting creations from the field of data visualization. As we love variety, you'll find pieces ranging from dynamic interactive applications to inspirational information graphics and everything in between.
Total Posts: 139
To successfully visualize your ideas you need adequate tools. Pencil and paper for basic ideas. Pixel or Vector graphics for more precision. Scripting languages for interactive visualizations. Serverside data processing for dynamic or real-time visualizations. To give you an overview over the best tools available we introduce libraries, applications, web services and so on.
Total Posts: 25

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Aug 31, 2009

Interactive Comments from Digg.com

Manuel Tan from uncontrol.com has published a small appilcation to visualize discussions. Attributes like rating, amount of words and count of replies indicate how vibrant discussions about a specific article are.

Commentry is an interactive 3d visualization of comments on a popular digg story. Digg’s rating system combined with word counts allows us to see the status as well as health of a story. Heated debates can easily be found as well as popular reactions(good or bad) made by a given user.

The visualization is a three dimensional rotating Pie Chart. Each slice represents a comment about the story. It’s word count is represented by the width, the amount of replies by the length and the rating from “positive” to “negatve” is indicated by the color.

commentry_01 commentry_02

Commentry is created using the Digg.com API, Stamen’s flash dev kit and Papervision 3D.

Recently there have been repeatedly great discussions about Pie Charts (1, 2, 3) (Okay, there have always been discussions about their usefulness). What are your thoughts about the usage of a three dimensional Pie Chart for the Commentry visualizations?

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Information Visualization Manifesto by Manuel Lima John Maeda on Processing

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Neal Levene
First, thank you for mentioning my posts over at SimpleComplexity.net.

Regarding the usage of a three dimensional Pie Chart, it is an interesting question. I have trouble understanding what I am looking at in the visualization. I'm assuming blue is positive rating and red is negative rating; however, blue has negative numbers and red positive numbers. It must be the other way around.

I'm very interested in techniques that try to visualize unstructured text. I hope I'm understanding what is represented. Each wedge represents the % of words in a particular comment (or a comment and the replies to the comment) as part of a whole discussion. The length of the wedge gives an indication of the volume of replies. Lastly, there is a vertical component that shows rating.

If that is true, than the widest, longest, highest wedge would seemingly be where most of the highly-rated, active discussion is occurring.

The 3-d representation always will have a scaling problem when viewed in 2-d. Additionally, there are 3 dimensions, but just one text label. It is not totally clear what that number represents. I think it is the positive/negative quality. As I looked at the visualization though, I kept thinking it should represent the length of the wedges.

For me, I'm not positive my understanding of the discussion is enhanced by the visual. It would be interesting to know what question the visualization is addressing. What would someone do with this information?

It is an interesting project. Visualizing text is still in its infancy. All experimentation will advance best practices.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Sorry for my rambling comment.

Wiederkehr
Thanks for your input Neal. Here are some of my thoughts to some points you've mentioned:
<ul>
<li>A color scheme from red to blue would be interpreted by many people as ranging from negative (red) to positive (blue) – in this case it's the other way around. But as we know color is a difficult attribute to show a rating as the symbolism of colors vary for different target audiences. Maybe therefore the rating is also indicated by the position on the z-axis.</li>
<li>Labeling the axis would make it easier to read the attributes of a conversation.</li>
<li>A wedge represents the % of words in regard to the total count of words of all comments.</li>
<li>3D representation is often used to indicate another attribute that could not be displayed in plain 2D. In this case though the third dimention is used to duplicate the color-indication if I understand this correctly.</li>
</ul>
I'll check whether Manuel could clarify what question this visualization adresses.

mannytan
Hi Neal Levene, thanks for reviewing the chart. This is one of my first real experiments with data visualizations in 3d space and any input is welcomed.

The color scheme is subjective. I originally interpreted the colors in terms of temperature, the red tint refers to the 'hotness' of the comment with the deepest saturation being the most dugg comment. I can see the blue being a positive metric but i may change the color scheme to something more standard like a green to red spectrum.

One of my basic assumptions were that people who wrote a fair amount of words on a comment have a tendency to get the most feedback. A pie chart was used to show the percentage of words typed as compared to the entire group. The color of each slice refers to the level of agreement the comment has generated and the radius refers to how many replies your comment has made. In theory, the more prominent the slice, the more meaningful it was to all readers. In reality, I've noticed that most users prefer not to respond/rate long-worded comments (unless it's ascii art related) but to simple one liners.

The scaling problem was actually accidentally intentional (if that makes any sense). Since the comments were rated, rotating the diagram around allowed you to focus more on positive or negative comments without completely warping the results. My only regret was that I didn't properly describe it.

My method for creating this chart was a hit or miss approach. Mixing and matching these different metrics with different attributes of a pie chart proved to be more challenging than I thought however I'm pleased with the overall result.

Red48
Sounds like you are being smart to bring those documents as back-up. ,

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Author: Benjamin Wiederkehr
Category: Showcases
Tags: 3D; Papervision3D; Pie Chart; Social
URL: /?p=2999

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This Interactive Comments from Digg.comarticle is published by Benjamin Wiederkehrunder a Creative Commons (?) license.

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