Visualizations
Check out this demo of elastic lists (note the Tufte-insipired sparklines) looking at Nobel Prize data. First thing I did when I was playing around was see how many medicine, physics, chemistry and economics winners I could find from the Gap. In my five minutes, I only found one: Abdus Salam of Pakistan who won The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979. I’ve been thinking for a while that Nobel Prizes could be another metric for mapping the Core/Gap divide.
For folks wanting to build their own visualizations, check out IBM’s Many Eyes. Very hot. Upload your own dataset and then view the data through a nice selection of pre-made interactive visuals that can be published to a blog.
On a less breath-taking note, GeoHive has a nice aggregation of global statistics. All stuff you could have found elsewhere, just brought together in one place with a reasonably intuitive interface.
Finally, I expect folks are already familiar with Gapminder, so you’ll be as excited as I was to learn that Google has acquired Gapminder’s Trendanalyzer software. I expect to see some face-meltingly powerful services coming out of this.
“I expect to see some face-meltingly powerful services coming out of this.”
I can sense that you really enjoyed writing that sentence.
Comment by A.E. — March 23, 2007 @ 10:17 am
:-)
Comment by Wiggins — March 23, 2007 @ 2:21 pm
Also, as much as I hate power-points, I’m seriously considering making one. I’ve been watching the power-points at DNI and there’s something strangely appealing about it.
Comment by A.E. — March 24, 2007 @ 2:20 am
It all depends on what your purpose is. If you have a series of useful graphics that you want to compile, then building a powerpoint brief can be very useful. For an absolute graphic design neophyte like myself, it is one of the easiest ways to throw images and charts together for projection.
Just be careful of the siren song of making the powerpoint brief the sole document of your thoughts. I’ve done that and only later realized that I had crap. My thinking didn’t progress and what seemed brilliant turned out to be trite.
Chet’s briefs on DNI are an excellent example. He uses graphics well but they are really just the illustrations for his major ideas (that he has recorded and explained in monographs). If you’ve seen any of the videos floating around of him briefing, he gives an excellent talk with no slide support. I think of Chet’s powerpoint decks almost as the illustrated inserts from his books, along with some summary notes.
All that being said, if you don’t have experience making briefings, it’s a good idea to get practice since they do represent the dominant form of communication in the world of American national security.
cheers,
W
Comment by Wiggins — March 27, 2007 @ 8:45 am
Try the anti-PowerPoint: Say It In Six, by Ron Hoff, an obscure little book with a message that works.
regards,T
Comment by Tom Blau — April 7, 2008 @ 2:14 pm