I’ve been having a few chats with people recently who are starting to dabble with Twitter – They get it great but now it has come to the point where I’m wondering how do I get them to think that it is not just a way of having a conversation.
It is a transport mechanism for carrying any sort of message – be that human conversation, computer messages, collating messages or sending messages.
How can I show the value of messages?
My good friend Mike Stenhouse created Out of five – a beautifully elegant way to capture reviews. You tweet in the name of the gig/film/book with a rating (out of five) and a short review.
@oo5 Coraline 4.0 simply wonderful
You have a record of what you’ve experienced with a date and a way of getting at that data later (through your own rss feed). Also a brilliant social aspect kicks in as the reviews are trasmitted through twitter so if you are following a person who reviews something – you see their review and could find a way into OO5 that way. Also all the reviews collated together and you start to see other peoples reviews of the things you like – You could follow those people as they could be your influencers if you share the same tastes.
Nathan from flowing data has been beta testing your flowing data for a little while and now it has launched. The mechanic to OO5 is very similar but it is more open in terms of what it records – In that you can record any metric – If you want to track your weight you just tweet -
d yfd weigh 160
Again all that data you send in can be extracted and the other benefit is that data visualisations can be generated straight from the site.
New York Times – I believe they were the first newspaper to open their content via an API.
Wattson – If you’ve ever wanted to know how much electricity you consume then the Wattson is for you – You clip it to your electricity supply and it collates all the usage info. You can then interface with the API to start to play with the data.
Pachube – Taking the Wattson to a much higher level – Pachube is a dataset collated from buildings – Lots of environmental data to play with – building temperatues, humidity, lights. Building 2.0 here we come.
Last.FM – The API has exposed a mass of user data regarding music usage.
Flickr - Photographs on tap with a very comprehensive API. Very well documented.
Tools (Any further recommendations please send my way as this list is no means definitive)
Processing – The environment of all the experts – I think processing is very easy to pick up and learn but you will need to work at writing code. The forthcoming ‘Beautiful Data’ book might be a good way in.
Many Eyes – A very usable way to create quite straightforward datavisualisations – Created by IBM.
Flare – A set of libraries for Flash which let you prototype visualisations – you do need Flash knowledge for this.
Arduino – Linking physical objects to the internet a la ‘Physical Internet’ has really started to interest me and there is a growing crowd of people ‘Doing it with others’ – The Arduino is a very simple to use piece of electronics that can be flashed to control devices or transmit data to the internent. Thanks to Make and Instructables – There has never been an easier time to break out the soldering iron and get building.
Yahoo Pipes- Even non coders can start to play with data – Using Yahoo pipes you can take all sorts of data feeds and aggregate them together to manipulate them.
Flowing Data – Nathan is a curator of data and stats – Flowing data is a superb resource for more traditional forms of data vis. He also created ‘your flowing data’ which is a system of capturing data through a mobile interface and twitter. Sort of like daytum.
Marius Watz – A great fine artist in his own right – Marius has explored ways of rendering data as physical forms – his wood etchings are beautiful. When exploring visualising stock data for the Knight Capital Group, the end result have an aesthetic of an atom bomb going off. He also runs the generator.x generative art site, vimeo and flickr groups where you can spend hours taking in the work.
Jer Thorp – If anyone can make beauty out of the new york times then Jer can – His use of the NY Times API as a dataset has started to reveal some inspiring visuals. If you want to get your hands dirty then there are two tutorials to play with – one for the NY Times and one for the Guardian. His recent work ‘Just Landed’ shows how twitter can be mapped to location.
Jonathan Harris / Sep Kamvar – Gleaning emotion and sentiment from the internet and displaying this is a damn hard thing. Making an emotive art piece out of this mass of information is even harder and Jon and Sep continually do this. ‘We Feel Fine’ and ‘I Want You To Be Me’ are two examples of how they visualise emotion scraped from the ether.
Advanced Beauty – Matt Pyke curated twenty motion pieces exploring ‘synasthesia‘ – visualisaing sound. Many of the pieces are based on generative art processes and are showcases for cutting edge motion graphics artists.
Jason Bruges – Jason Bruges heads up an architectural design studio exploring visualising data created in realtime by physical interaction.Some very simple interactions such as wind powering lights or displaying the latent imprint of lift usage by hacking into the building lift interface – Very exciting stuff.
Ben Fry – In my opinion one of the founding fathers of modern data vis and co-created processing – His body of work is staggering and he currently heads up the Seed Media Group.
Casey Reas – Also co-created processing with Ben Fry and has exhibited many generative art pieces in traditional gallery spaces.
Robert Hodgin- I’ve been a massive fan of Robert for more years than I can remember as he is a leading experimental flash designer and coder. He creates pure beautiful eye candy.
Golan Levin – Another artists exploring visualising emotions – ‘The Dumpster’ was a great piece. It scanned the internet for comments about relationships breaking and then visualised them. His physical interaction pieces are hilarious – check ‘Snout’.
Ear Studio – I first encountered ‘Listening Post’ last year at the Science Museum – it was hidden in a dark corner and it was just transfixing – It was a bank of small screens that spoke back snippets from the millions of posts on chat rooms across the internet – effectively giving the internet a spooky synthesised voice.
UVA – A great design studio playing with light, sound, space and architecture.
Marcus Wendt – Marcus and the field.io team are not classical data vis but they are doing some stunning generative artworks.
Pitch Interactive – A really interesting interactive design agency doing some some great vis work.
If ‘Data visualisation is the new rock’n’roll’ then coders are the new rockstars. Code for me is natural – I’ve been playing for quite a few years but I was never really into exploring data visualisation – Mid last year I was fortunate enough to be given a dream project and I produced the ‘Beautiful Connections’ campaign for Nokia which explored visualising the beauty of everyday conversation.
This allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people I had admired from afar as we used data visualisation, generative art, motion and code to start to explore this space – honestly we’ve got a lot more exploration to do. So in my travels I worked with some exceptional people and also made contact with a whole scene and started to see the ’scenes within the scenes’.
I don’t believe that data visualisation is just the expression of a static data set in a graphical way to try and glean an insight – To me it is taking any data set – static or realtime and expressing this is any other way in any medium.
So lets talk about people (who I think are exploring interesting visualisations with code and interaction), data (what datasets are out there to use), and tools (how to get your hands dirty).
Interactive installation work is really becoming really interesting of late as more brands commision work and more design studios are born out of the frustration of working in one medium – really blurring the lines between art/architecture/design/interaction. A great way to introduce yourself to this world is with the upcoming Kinetica Art Fair.
Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.
More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.
The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.
It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.
When you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a visual technique that really makes you sit up and take notice. ‘Datamoshing’ with its seriously terrible moniker, hit the mainstream recently with the new Kayne West ‘Welcome to heartbreak’ video. It breaks in from black into this riot of colour that is so blocky and compressed you think that youtube is actually broken. But it isn’t. It is the intent of the director who employs this techique of glitching out the video and blending the motion together to create something quite mesmerising.
But this effect isn’t new. It is very very very old. If you’ve every played a divx video without the right codec installed, you get these compression artifacts because your computer doesn’t understand how to render the video. I’ve seen it many times when you skip through a video and the frames start to ‘blend’ together, but never investigated if some bright spark had applied it in some creative way. Well, with the Kayne video coming to light, a lot of the design blogs are point towards David OReilly as being one of the first artists/directors to intentionally glitch video.
After immersing myself in the world of compression glitching I’m really loving how this technique instantly puts you on edge and unsettles you. Taking it further and glitching the edits or blowing the compression so much you can’t actually tell what you are looking at really makes you look harder. A brilliant way to subvert the medium.
The NY Times have recently released an API allowing developers to access a huge archive of news and data. This is a perfect example of how an open attitude to intellectual property increases brand awareness because people hack/mould/mash/visualise the data in interesting ways.
The brilliant Jer Thorp has starting putting together some stunning data visualisation with processing.
This is a visualization of the frequency of the words ’socialism’ (orange) and ‘capitalism’ (green) in New York Times articles since 1981.
This visualization reads like a clock. 12:01am is January 1st1984 and 11:59pm is January 1st 2009.
