Sparklines Hit All Tendenci Sites – Massive Amounts of Data in a Little-Itty-Bitty Space

Sparklines, like this one

, were created by Edward Tufte.  Sparklines have gone live on all Tendenci association web sites. The image below is a crop from an articles management report, but the actual sparkline is visible to all visitors to any site.  The idea is to accept the fact that the visitor is intelligent and would also like to see the performance of an article among other readers.

The above is an screen shot image, but you can read the articles here, here and here respectively.

One trend visible on other sites with much content locked down for members only is a huge reduction in views of restricted content. This is intuitively obvious.The sparklines help make the case by hitting you over the head with obvious visualization of what the users are doing.

People do not like to be hassled.  They don’t want to go to your site, login and search when they can go to google and search across multiple sites faster.  The result is locking down your content causes it to go unseen for the most part.  Don’t blame the sparklines – they are just telling you the facts.

Julian Beever Sidewalk Art – Poverty in Perspective

Everything is relative.  Julian Beever sidewalk art at its best.  Thanks for the amazing visual forward TJ!

Visualization – One Artist on the Importance of Color

A good friend sent me a few shots of Cheryl Tamborello’s work.  I liked this quote from Cheryl’s resume:

"Working with layers, allows me to build up subtleties of color that psychologically impact the viewer.  Through the use of color, I hope to jostle the viewer’s memory of a particular place, reminding them of a moment they may have had." – Cheryl Tamborello, Houston Artist (emphasis added by me)

Sort of an attempt at abstract random mnemonics (memory aiding devices) for the viewer.  Performance art in static form through visuals.  The same thing that makes visiting the Rothko Chapel an obligation if you are in the Houston area (pictures never do Rothko justice as I am sure is the case with Tamborello as well).

While the three main learning styles are visual, auditory and kinaesthetic it has been my experience that visual is dominant in almost every individual I have worked with.  This might be self selection based on industry but I doubt it.  You can test learning styles and determine that someone is an auditory learner, but when asked "what car did you drive in high school?" they will picture it first before reliving the engine sound or some other related sound in their mind.

Thanks Rachel!

Flyspy visualization of airline ticket data via Techcrunch

A visual mashup of airplane tickets.  This is why I am so excited about great visualization.  Huge amounts of data, HUGE AMOUNTS, are easily understandable with the right visual.  Not only is your visual memory unlimited, but millions of data points are easily understandable to a 12 year old with the right visual.  Patterns are apparent, lumpy lines are best according to Tufte, at a glance.

A good example of this was highlighted on TechCrunch today by Nik Cubrilovic in Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing.  First the good news from the post:

Flyspy reverse engineers some of the mystique associated with the airline industry and makes it extremely transparent.

and

The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.

and

Overall a very cool service that epitomizes what the new web is about. Flyspy should go public in a few months – you will hear more about it here and probably feel the distruption.

Now for the bad news.  You can’t trademark or patent a visual as far as I know.  And this is fundamentally a line graph.  So there must be some other differentiation.  There are definitely a few investment problems with mash ups.  So I love it, but I wouldn’t invest in it without some form of protection.  I definitely wish them the best.

The Dumpster interactive online visualization

The Dumpster, a blatant repost from Doc, yet still must at a minimum be in my collection of back links.  From the site:

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. … The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

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From a visualization and ethnography perspective it is worthy of recording.  It would be like if Flash had never experienced Joshua Davis as a leader.  Yet like much of Joshua’s work, there is something missing. It is cool, but what did we LEARN?  Is it in any way predictive?  Interfaces are great, but can we load up our friendly neighborhood neural net and get cranking away on what the opportunties are for the team next week!?!