Datavisualization

This week’s lecture was our last for this semester and the topic was datavisualisation, which is the visual representation of data, information which has been abstracted in some schematic form.

According to the freelancing web designer, Vitaly Friedman: “The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often fail to achieve a balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve their main purpose — to communicate information”.

In the tute for this week we looked at websites that fell into the category of datavisualisation. The one I looked at was called Digg Labs. This website is connected with Digg.com which is a social news site. On Digg.com users post stories and links to things happening around the world and on the internet. People read the stories and if they like it the have the option to press a button labelled Digg, which has a little thumbs up next to it. The more popular the story is the more Digg’s it’ll get and so the most popular stories of the day will be the ones posted on the main page of Digg.com.

Digg Labs consists of six graphs that show specific information about popularity of stories and other things along those lines. The first is 365 which shows the top ten stories on any day, month and year. The second called Pics tracks the activity of images on the site. The third, Arc displays stories, topics and containers wrapped around an arc. The fourth, BigSpy, places stories at the top of the screen as they are Dugg, as new stories are Dugg old ones move down the list. The fifth which is called Swarm draws a circle for stories as they’re Dugg, Diggers swarm around stories and make them grow.

The sixth graph and the one I found most interesting was Stack. It’s presented in the form of a collum graph. It occurs in real time showing Diggs as they happen. When a story is Dugg a small block falls from the top and lands on top of the story it was for making that individual collum larger. Along the bottom there is also a smaller version of the BigSpy where stories are constantly coming up and being pushed down depending on their popularity. You can choose a story via its collum and it brings up a screen showing you the number of Diggs the story has received, the time it was put up and a link to the actual website so you can read the story for itself.

I found the website very interesting and it gave me some good ideas for the up coming assignment, although I don’t think there will be anyway my assignment will be as good as Digg Labs.