from data visualisation to word clouds and navigation
Data visualisation was the subject that I have tampering with over the past few days, enough to find increasingly fascinating … and here is what inspired me to share tonight..
I have done a proper research in it for a small project of visualising statistical data, like google analytics statistic tools into fascinating interactive visually appealing applications like Juice Analytics visualisations API and articles like the one of Journerdism
“Why is it that analysts must have a linear, logical and cubism mind frame? Does it have to be that boring?” -No!
“Can it possibly be more playful and abstract, yet still providing an overview of that precious data?” -Yes!
After all if you think of it the world is a stage of information. Visions can tell stories, so data visualisation storytelling is a fantastically dynamic tool in the hands of the designer it is quite interesting how close it is a study to that of a multimedia interactive designer. Both thinking wise (user interaction) & tool wise (Illustrator, Flash-html 5+Css3, maya, processing).
Recently I have had the change to experience and play with some open source data visualisation tools one such is an IBM project, Many Eyes, where I had the change to create a cloud generator of random words. Words could be website keywords over time. But in their output engine I didn’t have the chance to input my content and visualise it…
but tonight I found this…
It is random activities in my life and a pattern began to emerge, do you see a navigation structure in there? words…could be used as anchors to horizontally or vertically ease to a topic, say photography or multimedia!! I was shuddered at the idea!!
But I don’t want to use flash and I am only a beginner with jquery, the image map idea seems so 2000 to me and trust me it will be messy with coordinates impossible to anchor without jS…No! So, why not take advantage of 2011 technologies…so…how about css3 text rotation element and custom font family, nice semantic hover states of the links with background colour, but what about the anchoring…html 5 qualities or jquery and how would you do it?
Let me know what you think
PS: this is a 
from data visualisation to word clouds and navigation by Calliope Georgousi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. idea to build upon © 2011
2011
What a joy to find such clear thinking. Thanks for pontsig!