Info 202 Fall 2011

I came across this project developed a few years back by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamwar called "We feel fine". The application crawls through various blog sites and looks for words "I feel .." or "I am feeling .." and captures the whole sentence until the period. The application displays each sentence as a dot(represents a single person’s feeling) that have their own physics and are continuously moving on the browser. This representation is called "Madness". The color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling it represents (bright dots are happy, dark dots are sad), and the diameter of each dot indicates the length of the sentence inside. One can click on any of the dots, read the sentence that the dot represents and also go to the blog that it was pulled from. 

  The application has a few more representations of the data collected like Montage, Murmur, Mobs, Mounds. This project is as much a piece of art as it is science. And that I think is what makes Data Visualization very interesting. Data takes a whole new meaning by the way it is presented. It is as if the data is come to life and has a story to tell. A few other data visualizations that I liked

#thankyousteve : Portrait of Steve Jobs made of public tweets tagged with #thankyousteve sent out over a four and a half hour period on the evening of October 5 (controlled vocabulary..?). See large size for image and Original for the tweets.

If the world’s population lived in one city : If the world's 6.9 billion people lived in one city, and the city were as dense as a city close to you, how big would the city be?