Lecture 7

Information Visualization


First a couple casual info-viz tools:

wordle - http://www.wordle.net/

eg a comparison of Obama's Innaugural adress to Bush's Farewell address where words that are said more often are larger.


DiskInventoryX, WinDirStat to see relative file sizes on disk, flattening out the hierarchies and colour-coding by file type as one example of treemaps - http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml


Newsmap shows the news of the moment in a similar style - http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/


theme river style:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html


http://www.xoxosoma.com/tokyo-tuesday/

name voyager - http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager


job voyager - http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/index


and the new google trends site is interesting http://www.google.com/trends

lots of good stuff here - http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/timelines.html
and more modern stuff here - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

growth of target (earthquake data is often visualized the same way) - http://projects.flowingdata.com/target/


here is a site with lots of nice examples http://flowingdata.com/

There are many info-viz tools with similar abilities. The one we will take a look at is XmdvTool, and it has a homepage at: http://davis.wpi.edu/~xmdv/

There is a full version and a java 'lite' version. Neither has been updated in a few years, but its free and has all the basic tools.

Another similar application that hasn't been updated in a while is Mirage - http://www.bell-labs.com/project/mirage/

Here are some notes introducing Xmdv from a study done by one of our PhD students, Kyoung Park, a couple years ago.

The XmdvTool site has a downloadable version of the car dataset from the examples. In order to run it with the lite version however you will need to edit the fcars.okc file so that the top of the file looks like this:

7 392
MPG
Cylinders
Horsepower
Weight
Acceleration
Year
Origin
8. 50. 4
2.8 8.2 4
40. 250. 4
1500. 5500. 4
5. 30. 4
69.5 82.5 4
.8 3.2 3
18.000000 8.000000 130.000000 3504.000000 12.000000 70.000000 1.000000

Coming Next Time

Current Trends


last revision 2/16/09 - (added in google trends link)