THATCamp Switzerland (Concluding Remarks)

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Nov 132011

THATCamp Switzerland is now over and everyone has dispersed to their various ends of the earth, which in my case means a flight out of Geneva tomorrow morning.

My impression was that the experience was a good one for those in attendance. I certainly got plenty of positive feedback. Of course, one rarely hears the negatives in situations like this, so it’s quite possible that some weren’t pleased with the whole unconference concept, but I certainly didn’t see anyone who looked unhappy or frustrated during the two days.

At the concluding session, attended by about half of those who were there when we started, several people emphasized their belief and/or hope that further connections and collaborations would grow from this THATCamp. If this one is anything like the others I’ve attended, that will certainly be the case. And, I was pleased to note, a number of people referred to my admonition on the morning of Day One to “have fun.”

If only one could say that about the other academic conferences we attend…

Final Call: What Does Your Soul Look Like?

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Oct 142011

What Does Your Soul Look Like?
Way back, way back in time (er 2009), we asked you to draw your souls. Just a five-minute sketch as part of a piece of interactive art.

We were curious about how people perceive their ‘souls’. Hell, we could even maybe visualize a taxonomy of souls?

Anyway, we’ve had loads of entries. Loads. Such lovely ones, too. And in this case, more is more.

So feel free to send us your hand-drawn soul. Which can mean your self, your personality, your insides, however you see your you. Just follow the instructions below and be part of the mass.

DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS

Here’s what to do
Please draw your soul on white paper with a black or dark pen. (Although colour is okay too, if you feel you really need it.) Then scan, webcam or photo it and upload it to:
InformationIsSoulful AT Gmail

(You can also draw on the computer if you really want. Though I think hand-drawn might be more…soulful?)

Tips:
: Create a moment for yourself to do it.
: Be expressive.
: Don’t think about it too much. Just draw whatever comes to mind. 1st drafts are good.
: It can be as simple or as complex as you like
: IMPORTANT: Please mark your picture in one corner to indicate whether you are male (M) or female (F)

Quality
If you’re webcamming or photo’ing, please use a flash or good lighting. Ideally it’ll be pretty much in focus. And filling the frame with the minimum of creases and crinkles.

Credits & Anonymity
If you’re happy for your name to appear in the credit lists of any resulting image, please write words like ‘HAPPY TO BE CREDITED’ in your email. Otherwise, we will treat your submission as anonymous. (If you want to be fully anonymous, you can use yousendit.com.)

That email address is: InformationIsSoulful AT Gmail

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions @ MoMA

Data Visualisation, David McCandless, Facebook, Fun, infodesign, infographia, infographics, Information Design, information graphics, Information Is Beautiful, InfoVisualisation, McCandless, Social networks, The Visual Miscellaneum, Twitter, visual miscellaneum, visualisation Comments Off

Jul 262011

Very honoured that the Hierarchy of Digital Distractions features in the latest exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York.

“Talk To Me”, curated by the legendary Paola Antonelli, explores how innovations in communication design are transforming our lives. It features interactive objects, data visualizations, and brain-blending guerilla tech projects.

The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions explores and visualizes the subtle, invisible structure I use to prioritize one digital distraction over another. Check out its page on MoMA and press some buttons. (if you tweet, use #ttmhierarchy).

limited edition prints

To celebrate, I’ve created a batch limited edition prints. Oh man – they’re gorgeous.

I thought it would be ironic to render such a technological-themed viz with the really old-school “risograph” print technique. It produces a really grainy, smudgy, soulful ‘old-school’ look. (Thanks to HatoPress in London for their awesomely detailed work).

Look at that!

(They’re also super eco-friendly: printed on recycled art paper with soy-based inks.)

You can order limited edition signed prints now in our store.

source: my tawdry life

Having Fun With History

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May 052011

Last week a friend sent me the link to the YouTube channel of the History Teachers, two high school teachers in Hawaii who create music videos using well known pop songs, stripping out the vocal tracks, and adding their own lyrics. Those original lyrics are history lessons. So, for instance, one can watch/listen to “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell recast as a history of the Trojan Wars or a history of the French Revolution set to “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga.

As cheesy as they may seem on first glance, I really like the playfulness of these teachers. As I’ve written here and elsewhere, I think historians have gotten way to stodgy in our approach to teaching about the past and these teachers have found a way to engage students without taking themselves very seriously. And they are reaching a much wider audience than just their own students (412,000 views of the French Revolution video as of May 4, 2011). Sure, it’s a simplified version of the past. Sure, their versions reinforce a tendency to compress complicated historical issues into a few minutes of text/video/power point slides. But so what? The point, it seems to me, is not to present a complex and nuanced version of the past. Rather, it is to introduce a complicated subject in a fun and engaging way that will then make it possible for teachers and their students to interrogate the evidence in much more complex ways in class.

These videos were a lot of work and so are clearly a labor of love. I’m not suggesting that we all tap our inner Culture Club or Britney Spears. But I am suggesting that the more ways we can find to lighten up a little, to stop taking ourselves so seriously, the more ways we’ll find our students engaging with our serious work.

Learning How To Visualize

Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, David McCandless, Fun, InfoBeautiful, infographia, infographics, Information Design, information graphics, Information Is Beautiful, InfoVisualisation, The Visual Miscellaneum, visual miscellaneum, Workshops No Responses »

Feb 212011

Exoplanets - Visualization for Wired UK - InformationIsBeautiful.net
Been getting a ton of requests for ‘how to’s and guides for creating decent visualizations and information designs. Made me think: maybe I could do some workshops in this area. I like developing ideas and working with people. Could be fun!

So if you think you’d like to attend a workshop on visualization or organize one for your organisation, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

some guides

In the meantime, you might be interested in a section I’ve been building in a far-flung corner of the site. It documents my process for creating infographics.

The most recent one explores the stages we went through creating an infographic for Wired magazine about planets in other solar systems – or “exoplanets”.

(Microscopic, dark and unimaginably far away, these tiny celestial objects should be impossible to spot. But thanks to extreme telescopy, deep data analysis, and ingenuous hacking, astronomers have now detecting over 500 bizarre and exotic alien worlds thousands of lights years away. So cool!)

Here’s how we created it.

some other examples

Timelines: TimeTravel in TV and Film
Yup, we went through 36 drafts of this. Yes, I am a rampant perfectionist. Yes I can be difficult to work with.

Information is Agonizing: Designing The Cover of the book
Creating the UK cover for Information Is Beautiful was an agonizing yet gloriously creative pain in the ass involving over 90 – yes nine-ty – different versions.

Versioning: Because Every Design Is Good For Something
How do you flag and label 142 countries on a single map without choking the result? With great difficulty.

I hope this is helpful. And again if you think you’d like to attend a workshop to learn how to create these kind of images, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

Horoscoped

cancer, Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, David McCandless, diagram, Fun, InfoBeautiful, infodesign, infographia, infographic, infographics, Information Design, information graphics, Information Is Beautiful, InfoVisualisation, The Visual Miscellaneum, visual miscellaneum No Responses »

Jan 192011

Do horoscopes really all just say the same thing? We scraped & analysed 22,000 to see.

See our completed meta-horoscope chart and make up your own mind.

We’ve also created a single meta-prediction out of the most common words..

How we did it

Horoscoped - Scraping 22,000 horoscopes
How do you gather 22,000 horoscopes? Obviously you could manually cut and paste them from one of the many online Zodiac pages. But that, we calculated, would take about a week of solid work (84.44 hours). So we engaged the services of arch-coder Thomas Winnigham to do a bit of hacking.

Yahoo Shine kindly archive their daily predictions in a simple and very hackable format (example). Thank you! So Thomas wrote a Python script to screen-scrape 22,186 horoscopes into a single massive spreadsheet. Screen-scraping is pulling the text off a website after it’s displayed. Python is a programming language. You can use it to write scripts that only gather the specific text you want. Then you run it multiple times so it mines an entire website.

Well, it’s not quite that easy. Big sites like Yahoo have ‘rate-limiting’ on their servers. That means if you access a page too many times too quickly, it thinks you’re a hacker and deploys all kinds of anti-hacking counter-measures. Initially, Thomas set his scraping speed too high (once every 10th of a second) and his IP got instantly banned from Yahoo for 24 hours. After some experimenting (and more bans), he found that a two second delay between scrapes prevented the defense mechanisms from kicking in. The script was set to run in the background (while we smoked cigars and discussed the empire). 12 hours later, we had our 22,000 horoscopes in a single file!

We can’t share the 9.5MB spreadsheet with you because it’s Yahoo’s copyright. But here are the Python scripts should you feel like recreating the experiment.

https://gist.github.com/776219
https://gist.github.com/776228

Filtering it down

Horoscoped - Filtering 22,000 horoscopes
So every different type of horoscope got sucked up – career, teen, love, daily overview. Who knew there were so many? It was felt, though, that career & love predictions would have their internal biases i.e. lots of mentions of work, career, love, marriage etc. So we opted to just analyse the generic daily horoscopes for each sign. A total of 4,380 (365 per star sign).

Word Analysis Version 1

We used an online tool called TagCrowd to find the most common words. I prefer it to Wordle. You’ve got better control over any ‘noise’ in the signal, because you can not only filter common words (“and”, “for”, “is” etc) but also a special ‘stoplist’ of words you’ve chosen.

So we broke down the most common 50 words to see if there are any patterns of unique words. This is what was revealed:

Horoscoped - Unique words in top 50 words in predictions of each star sign

You can see the full data in a Google spreadsheet here.

Word Analysis 2

It struck me that several words in the top 50 – like “someone”, “really”, “quite” – were just qualifiers and not really that revealing. You’d find them in any English word analysis.

So we stripped those kinds of words out (see our stoplist). And lo! A fresh set of unique, revealing and more accurate words appeared in the top words per sign.

Horoscoped - Unique words in top 50 words in predictions of each star sign

Can I just say that I have no personal interest in horoscopes. I don’t know what the various characteristics of each star sign are meant to be. So you’ll have to tell me if any of this corresponds to folklore.

This was the data we used to create our meta-chart. Check out the final image. Or see all the data in this Google spreadsheet.

Meta-Prediction

One more thing though. This analysis appears to reveal something. The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch)

The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all star signs, every day of the year. Here it is.

Horoscoped - Meta-prediction made from most common words in 4,000 star sign predictions

The Future

As ever, I’ve laid out my whole process and all the data here: http://bit.ly/horoscoped.
That way it’s all balanced and you can make up your own mind. Typical Libran!

Concept & research & design: David McCandless
Additional design: Matt Hancock
Additional research: Miriam Quick
Hacking: Thomas Winningham
Source: Yahoo Shine Horoscopes
Code & Scripts: Here and here
Data & workings: bit.ly/horoscoped

Dec 312010

Our first animation. Enjoy!

$US version – see the video on youtube

£UK version – see the video on youtube

Data: http://bit.ly/debtris

We’ve been honing our animation skills. Expect more films, motion infographics and ‘info-mations’ in 2011. Follow us on Youtube for more.

If you’re an motion graphics type person looking to collaborate or work with us on similar projects, get in touch!

Design & direction: David McCandless
Animation: Miles Tudor, Dom Del Torto @ Big Animal
Music: Daniel Pemberton
Data: http://bit.ly/debtris

Oct 212010

See the image on its own

Something Spock might’ve knocked up in his first year at the Vulcan Science Academy.

That’s what I think when I look at this graphic. Now. Two years after myself and Laura Sullivan created it for my infographic book Information Is Beautiful (US | UK).

It’s been updated and regraphicked. I’ve folded in some new types of relationships from this awesome diagram from Franklin Veaux (via QuietRiotGirl).
(thanks to Elizabeth Dunn for sending!)

Sexperts! Let us know if we’ve missed anything.

RESEARCH & DESIGN: David McCandless & Laura Sullivan
ADDITIONAL DESIGN: Matt Hancock @ Pelican Jigsaw |
SOURCES: Wikipedia, The Ethical Slut, Franklin Veaux

2cultures.net(.au)