danielknox.net

December is a tough time of the year to get anything done and I now realize that my plan to develop stacked graph visualizations of Newstogram data (which required learning a new programming language) was overly optimistic.

I’ve pushed this out to 2010 but to keep me motivated I have added two stacked graph visualizations to my data wall:

1. Visualization of my Last.fm listening history (full PDF)

2. Visualization of my Twitter stream

Microsoft LiveLab’s new visualization tool Pivot looks amazing…. almost worth getting a Windows 7 machine to check it out!!

The feedback on my tree map visualization was very insightful. Colleagues pointed out that, while interesting, the tree map suffered from the same problem as my other attempts to visualize the Newstogram data: namely it doesn’t address the time dimension. While tree maps and other ‘static’ visualizations (such as bar charts) can display data over a number of different time periods, they don’t really show how the data is changing over time. In the case of many data sets, including the ‘news interest’ data we are tracking through Newstogram, this is the most interesting aspect of the data.

A possible solution is to use a stacked graph visualization. Stacked graphs have been used to visualize a number of data sets including movie revenues, music listening habits, twitter posts, baby names and how people spend their time. So, armed with Lee Byron’s Streamgraph whitepaper, my latest visualization project is to display Newstogram data in a stacked graph.

The L.A. Times has introduced a new personalization feature provided by VisualDNA.

The questions seem to go on forever and the end result (a page containing some vaguely personalized news) is hardly worth the effort… although its hard to be too upset with a service that tells you “You’re a Hot Shot”!

After seeing Nick Mihailovski’s Google Analytics / Protovis mash-up last week, I couldn’t resist playing around with the Protovis visualization package over the weekend.

My first visualization effort is a treemap showing the popularity of sub-categories within DailyMe.com based on Newstogram data for October 2009 (built upon the Protovis treemap example).



The colors represent primary categories, while the size of each sub-category corresponds to its popularity as measured by the ‘Digital News Affinity’ (DNA) score for October 2009.

The search field at bottom of the treemap highlights certain categories / sub-categories (e.g. searching for “sports” highlights the 14 sports sub-categories).

Check out the working demo (requires a modern browser e.g. Firefox, Safari).

The title isn’t a metaphor for information overload or filter failure… the walls of my office are literally covered in print-outs or drawings of histograms, pie charts, bar charts, treemaps, mindmaps and various other types of data display.

As DailyMe gets access to more and more data through the Newstogram platform, I am becoming increasingly focused on data visualization and specifically how to make our data visually appealing, easy to understand and (most importantly) useful for our clients.

One of my tasks for next week is to check out the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library and learn how to make my own treemaps (inspired by the team at Google Analytics who just released the video below showing how to create treemap visualizations of data extracted through their APIs) - I foresee more print-outs getting pinned to the walls….

Digg is showcasing some great news visualizations built on their API in the Digg Labs.

In particular, Stack built by Stamen Design is kind of fascinating to watch!

Its been around for a few years now but I don’t think there is a more useful or fascinating news visualization tool than Newsmap.