TLDR/Summary: There’s so much information out there and much of it is visualised in one form or another, interactive wise, charts and graphs seem the most common. I’m not worried about forming the interactive data visualisation currently, however I am concerned about what data to choose for it.
PS: The Nikon Universal (3) and Every Noise at Once (10) are soo worth checking out.
For this weeks tasks in the projects class, it has started quite simply with researching examples of interactive data visualisations, I assume this is to give us inspiration as well as a better understanding of what we are to produce by the end of the assessment. This is the collated results for 2.1 of the weekly briefs. Please note that I will be including images sourced from these to visually demonstrate them, each will have a a link to the source site of the data visualisation of course.
- A Day in the life of Americans
The interactivity in this is minimal, you can only affect the speed in which the animation of the day plays, slow-medium-fast, at key changes of percentage during the day text appears on the left giving context to the changes. However it is still an interesting visualisation.
- Wind Map
A wind map of America, I’ve noticed a lot of things are about america, this one is also not very forthcoming with interactivity, the animation plays and you can hover your cursor over the map of America to see how fast the wind is in that part and then click to zoom, it’s a cool effect though.
- Nikon Universcale
This data visualisation is quite fun, and a bit more light hearted than other examples listed here. Have you ever wanted to compare an ostrich’s height to how tall famous world wide monuments are? this does that and it amuses me greatly. you can go down to microscopic organisms to space giants all in a scale of size, these things in the real world wouldn’t come in contact so its fun to see. I did find the controlling of the scales a bit wonky however.
- Plane Truth
One of a couple visualisations from David Mccandless, this chart depicts every commercial plane crash in a period of twenty years. the colour and size of the squares symbolises the cause and number of fatalities, the opacity also correlates to how certain people are that the cause of the crash is right. you can filter the results by this and more like what phase of travel the plane was in when it crashed, hovering over a box will give you information on the exact crash.
- CNN Generation Diversity
The name for this one is what I’ve chosen to call it as the news style title of ‘millennial generation is bigger, more diverse than boomers’ seemed a bit click-baity. The interactivity is just hovering over the different years of birth, the topic is interesting at least.
- A Guide to Who is Fighting Whom in Syria
This chart is quite fun considering the rather serious topic, it has a simple and effective colour scheme as well as using smiley (or not so smiley) faces to get its point across, hovering with your cursor over a face on the chart will highlight the column and row so that it is easier to tell which two forces the face is referring to, clicking on the face gives more information about those involved and why their relationship is that way.
- Intermental
This is an infographic by McCandless is based on mental disorders related to the effect of constant device use and internet access. You can sort through the different types of ‘internet-induced disorders’ based on how they effect people, such as over-ingestion, dependancy, & behavioural patterns, as well as click to vote on the ones that you relate to.
- The Internet in Real Time
Okay, so this might not technically be ‘interactive’ as such, however it is a data visual of an interesting subject, you just watch the numbers change from second to second, it depicts 20+ of the largest websites and their traffic, such as posts on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, etc.
- Top 500 Passwords
Yet another computer/internet based graphic visualisation, this is also the third and final one from Mr McCandless. This is a graph of the most used passwords, ranked by how popular and common these passwords are, the size of the words dictates their strength as a password, I would probably want to not use any of the ones on this list honestly. you can also filter by what the password itself contains, whether its completely random, alphanumeric or something cutesy, etc.
- Every Noise at Once
Now we’re ending this list on one of the most fun interactive data visualisations I have come across, Every Noise at Once, is a gigantic chart (admittedly not very nicely designed) of all known genres of music, ever. clicking on the name of the music type will play a small clip of a song from that genre, clicking on the arrow that appears next to the emboldened name will take you to a list of musicians and artists who produce music in that genre. I gotta say, some of the styles sound quite outlandish and fun to me, from Japanese Jazztronica, to Swamp Pop, to Terrorcore and Glitter Trance, it all seems great.
Carpe Noctem Designs 