i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Maps. Most people think of them as a means of a getting us from Point A to Point B, but this article discusses how they have become more than a tool that keeps us from getting lost. In the not so distant past, we relied on paper maps that, for the most part, provided the user with a consistent visual vocabulary to determine exactly how to get from Point A to Point B.

Those of you who're interested in dashboards and how visualize complex information, might want to check out a source called Perceptual Edge. One of the partners of the company, Stephen Few, has done a lot of work studying the best ways to communicate complex business information in limited space. He was a guest lecturer in the InfoViz class last semester and provided a lot of good examples of well-designed dashboards. I believe he is also a lecturer at Haas, so he cares both about the business value of those dashboards and about their usability.

Along the lines of my previous post about tagging usage in del.icio.us, you might want to take a look at TagWiz. Hyunwoo Park, Satish Polisetti, and Dhawal Mujumbar created this tool to visualize the tags of an individual user in delicious. It provides tag frequency distribution visualization and a metric of how important the long tail effect is.

In his legendary TED talk, Hans Rosling, a global health researcher from Sweden, presents a tool called "Gapminder" which uses a simple and intuitive visualization of complex macroecononmic information to clearly point out particular global trends. This tool (available online) has access to a bulk of information about almost all countries in the world regarding GDP, HIV, CO2 emissions etc. starting from 1800. Rosling successfully bridges the gap by providing an interactive interface that allows the exporation of vast data sets in an intuitive and entertaining way.