Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with visualization

Help me visualize magnetic force

device55 — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:47:15 -0800

Carl Sagan famously demonstrated an excellent visualization of gravity. Can someone point me to a similar, elegant visualization of magnetic force?

Blue air in, Brown air out

Secret Life of Gravy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:22:31 -0800

Do you ever use visualization techniques such as imaginary trepanation? I use a number of visualizations (such as imagining your pelvis has an elevator when you do kegal exercises: 1st floor, second floor, 3rd floor and up to the penthouse and back down again to the sub-basement) and my family find it...eccentric. Actually my 16-year-old finds it weird. I ask for two reasons: to find out how odd it is and to find out if I am missing any good tricks.

I started as a child by performing imaginary trepanation when I had a headache. I would lie with my head on one side, imagine a hole on the side touching the pillow, and allow the poison to drip out. Sometimes I would also imagine a corresponding hole on the top side and pour cold water through the top hole so that it would wash away the poison on its way out through the bottom hole.

I still do that. I also visualize the air in color when I am doing deep breathing exercises: clear, blue, invigorating air, with a hint of mint going in, dusty, greenish-brown air going out.

When I am stretching, I imagine Spiderman-type silk webs shooting out from my fingers, toes, and top of my head which fasten to the ceilings and walls and pull slightly.

When I am tired/achy during exercise, I imagine myself a robot which can perform more smoothly and for longer periods of time than a mere mortal.

I'm sure there are others but these are the ones I use daily (except that I use the headache one only when I have a headache.)

Do you do any of these? Something different?

Have any data visualization recs?

k8t — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:34:55 -0800

I need cool data visualizations to project. Any recommendations? We want to project interesting data visualizations on the wall during an event. Ones that don't require any clicking or touching would be best. Thank you!

Event Production A&R? Corporate theater producer?

lothar — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:23:56 -0800

Authors have agents. Musical talent has A&R reps. Startups have VC. What is the category of representative, or who is the aggregator, for my business? We do live interactive performance visualization. It's live in the sense that nothing is prerendered (no video loops).
It's interactive because we hook up wireless controllers and cameras to stuffed snakes, eyeballs, and magic wands.
It's a performance when the audience plays with the snake and sees an onscreen snake mimic the motion they're making.
And it's visualization because the output is high-res, high frame rate, HD on multiple screens, usually large scale projection.

We need to get repped to the production companies and event designers who do corporate theater and live performance. The main "problem" is that we're almost the only folks doing what we do, so clients don't know they need us yet.

Please help us tech geeks find the marketing agency category or people who handle large scale procedural blinky pixels.

tableau for mac??

crapples — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:52:56 -0800

Help me find data visualization software like Tableau, where the visualizations can be viewed and interacted with by end users. But the rub is that I need it to work in the Macintosh environment. Tableau allows me to create data visualizations that include "quick filters" so that with the click of a check box I can include or exclude groups or values, updating the charts automatically (see product tour here). Also, it has the capability to publish these visualizations to the web so that end users can also interact with the data in the same way. But, Tableau only works with Windows.

The critical feature is end users filtering data on the fly with charts that I have created. The charts need to be in a central place so updates are worry free, so a web based solution is optimal.

I need these features, or similar ones, that work for Mac. Any suggestions?

Ways to see rhythms

argybarg — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:12:55 -0800

I'd like any software or website that helps visualize rhythms. It could be in musical notation, or flashing lights, colored shapes — anything that helps show meter, syncopation, layered rhythms. I'd be showing these on a screen for kids (K-5) in my music class to look at and clap along with to pick up rhythms. Simple is great; far-out and experimental might be interesting as well.

I'm on a Mac, if it matters.

Do movies shape the way we imagine things or vice versa?

Senor Cardgage — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:56:09 -0800

Do movies shape the way we imagine things or vice versa? I notice that when I dream/daydream/concept that I often think very cinematically (meaning imagining things staged/put together/"filmed" even in a motion picture narrative style). What I wonder is if one type of visual conception is a result of the other. I notice that when I dream/daydream/concept that I often think very cinematically (meaning imagining things staged/put together/"filmed" even in a motion picture narrative style). What I wonder is if one type of visual conception is a result of the other.

For instance, are the more cinematic conventions of imagination simply the way we as people imagine things and of course filmmakers eventually found ways to express that kind of imagination with technology OR are we so surrounded by ideas expressed in that visual fashion that we adopt them in to the way we conceive things and that informs the way we imagine and dream.

Also, I've often wondered after seeing pieces of ancient artwork if the flat-plane 2d style was also a product of the way we imagined and visualized the world around us or just technical limitations of the time. Did the advent of proscenium space thinking force a reconception of space for people in their own thoughts?

Sorry to go all late night dorm-room bongsmoke on you guys, but I've wondered this for a really long time and would love to get some different viewpoints from the hive on this.

How to make a vertical timeline?

jfricke — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:45:41 -0800

How to make a vertical timeline? I would like to make a timeline that I can publish on my website for visualizing important events in my life (like when I went to school, graduated from university, etc). There seem to be several online and offline apps for this purpose. However, none of them allows me to create a vertical instead of horizontal timeline.

Thus, I am looking for an application (web/mac) which allows me to make a vertical timeline and to publish it on my website.

Software for making clever information visualizations?

anthill — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:17:13 -0800

How to make clever visualizations from Excel or CSV data? Any free, flexible information-graphic scripting software out there? I'd like to make a stream graph or an emergent dot graph (like this one) using some time-stamped, categorical spreadsheet data.

Any recommendations for a graphing toolkit that can generate info graphics from CSVs?

What is this visualization?

R343L — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:10:40 -0800

Asking for a friend, what is this visualization on the White House website? You can see the part of interest between 01:34 and 01:39. One friend suggested it might be Etherape, but he couldn't see why the US government would be interested in it.

Any ideas what is being shown on this video?

What other organizations are doing what Decision Theater is doing?

Jennifer S. — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:10:35 -0800

What organizations provide collaborative decision-making via visualized data, like Arizona State University's Decision Theater? Decision Theater is a decision-making environment on the campus of Arizona State University. It uses visualized data shown on a large, immersive custom cinema that helps client organizations make decisions, mostly concerning urban growth, public health, education, and the environment.

Participants use 3-D animations and interactive scenaria that let them to pull up data from their own organization in order to view different outcomes in the visualizations.

NEMAC (National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center) in Asheville, NC USA uses a similar process to help clients make decisions, though NEMAC lacks Decision Theater's dedicated visualization environment.

I'm finishing up an undergraduate degree in mass communcation and want to go to grad school at a college that does this kind of work in information visualization and synchronous, collaborative decision-making.

So I want to know where any more places that do this kind of work are, and if they're affiliated with a university. I'm open to any site anywhere, although English is my only language, so I'd prefer a country where I could get by.

Thanks!

How do I get started with data visualization?

icarus — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:41:31 -0800

I'd like to figure out how to do good looking data visualization for reports beyond Excel charts, but without any coding/programming skills except xhtml/css. Bonus points for also listing some data visualization techniques or websites that you find useful, attractive, user friendly, etc.

2.0 election stuff that really helps people, not just impresses them

jessamyn — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:16:11 -0800

Examples of good web/election widgets to show to librarians this upcoming week? I'll be speaking at a conference this week talking about, among other things, Web 2.0 stuff. I'm looking for some good topical examples to briefly highlight. One of the best arguments for supporting public libraries in the US is that they're necessary for a functioning democracy, that it's important that people be able to freely research topics of interest so that they can become informed voters. There's upsides and downsides to this approach but I feel it's generally solid. In the library world there's also a lot of "well I don't really think this 2.0 stuff helps us do our jobs" attitude, especially in rural areas like the one I live in.

What I'd like to do is put together a small set of easy-to-understand web-based examples of 2.0 types of tools being used to help further our democratic ideal, regardless of the outcome of this election. So I'm not so much looking for "this helps us get out the vote for Candidate X" but something like "This application lets you type in your address to find your polling place" or "this lets you get information about how much money people in your zip code spent on Candidate X versus Candidate Y"

I'm looking for simple and practical. Eye candy with little useful application won't be as great. Extra points for libraries using any of this stuff. I'll be poking around on my own but figured people here might be more up on this sort of thing than I am. Thank you.

Basic costs for simple web development?

googly — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:10:14 -0800

I am writing a grant for a project that will include some relatively simple web development. Please help me with some rough estimates for labor and equipment costs. I am writing a grant for an academic project, part of which will involve developing a small website. The primary function of this website is to include a survey that asks respondents to compare visual materials (different representations of data) and answer some questions about them. [The research goal, for those who are interested, is to explore how visual representations of health information impact peoples' understanding and evaluation of that information]. I am woefully underinformed about web development, but here are two things that I know we will need:

- The site does not need to be commercially slick, but we would like it to look professional and be visually appealing, because the quality of the presentation plays a significant role in the research. I am thinking some kind of basic (flash-type?) animation rather than just a series of static pages.

- We want people to answer questions, and we want to collect data on the responses, so there will be some simple data management involved. (We can do more complicated analysis of the data on our own).

My questions:

(1) Roughly how much time would I need to budget for the programming and upkeep of something like this?

(2) Who can I get to do this work? I assume that a savvy CS undergrad or grad student could do this kind of thing, but is it necessary and/or worth it to hire a real web developer/designer?

(3) Depending on who we hire, roughly how much would this cost? We are in Montreal, Canada, BTW.

(4) We are already budgeting for some good (Mac) computers, so I think we've got the hardware portion covered - though any advice would be most appreciated of course! Do I need to budget for software as well, or can I assume that whoever I hire will already have the software? If the former, is there a standard software package that I should budget for (ideal), or do I need to have a rough figure and leave the specifics up to whoever I hire (less ideal)?

Apologies in advance for the vaugueness of these questions. If its not already apparent, I'm a total noob on these matters.

How detailed is your mental imagery / mental visualization?

horhey — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:55:11 -0800

I am curious about how detailed, or photographic/realistic the imagery in one's mind's eye is, and what in general would be considered "standard" for most people. Note I am not talking about "creative visualization" but I suppose it could be related. Specifically I am referring to simply the process of visualizing an object, face or scene in your mind's eye. When I visualize something in my 'mind's eye', it's very vague and impressionistic. As a visual artist (I am an illustrator) I find it disconcerting that I cannot regularly bring up vivid mental imagery.

I have had moments — usually before falling asleep — where vivid, detailed and realistic mental imagery comes into my mind's eye. But this is not something I can control or do so in waking hours. I have also had lucid dreams (where one realizes one is dreaming while dreaming) so I know my mind is capable of it.

A few years back I asked this question of friends, and most seemed to claim they had extremely vivid mental imagery. My problem here is that the answers were subjective — what I think of as vivid might not be the same as their definition. I explained it as follows: is the imagery photographic? If you could draw, could you use the mental imagery as a reference to draw from?

I am curious as to the general consensus of experience in this area — do most people have vague mental visualization, or is it common? Is there a way to cultivate this talent/ability if by nature you do not possess it?

Oddly, I had a difficult time finding out any sort of information on this topic via Google searching. It seems odd to me that this topic hasn't been explored more fully. Or perhaps I wasn't searching with the right terms.

Running a data only website?

gnossos — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:04:50 -0800

Any ideas on starting or running a website just for data and charts? I love data but hate the news. I always wonder "how do they know Americans drove 50 million fewer miles last month"? Where do they get that data?

I want to start a website just for data and charts so anyone can upload data and anyone could search for it.

The only limitations would be:
data has to be in Excel format (ubiquitous) and there has to be a citation (web link) to the original source of the data.

Any ideas on how to construct and manage such a thing?

Poster design - programs/resources for data driven visualizations?

figTree — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:52:13 -0800

professional looking data driven visualizations - resources/experience using different programs? I am looking into how to make vector based posters that show complex data, and need the graphics to be data driven. So far I have found 2 packages for this type of thing.

Processing this is essentially java stripped down to its graphical functions, it can do interactive/animated things too.

NodeBox is a python approach, but is officially only avaiable for mac. I found
this which is a windows version, but i would rather use something supported.

I haven't looked enough into either of these to know what the workflow would be for making something like this or like this . I don't know if its 100% coding or mostly coding, or if you can actually manually edit stuff around as well like in illustrator?

I am looking into maybe some other package that i have overlooked, and am also looking into how i can use illustrator to do data driven graphics type stuff. I have not been able to find much good information/tutorials on data driven illustrator. However, if it is quite limited on the scripting end, then i don't know if it would be the best way to go.

Just basically wanted to see if i can get any good advice in this area before i devote too much time to something that i will eventually drop for something else... I like the idea of using python, but would rather have something that is natively windows, and illustrator seems like it might not cut it, and i really don't feel much like learning java, even though it seem to me that processing is the leader in this area?

Pimp my NOC

empath — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:13:07 -0800

How do I make the projection screen in my NOC look like the control room at NORAD? We're adding a couple of huge projection screens to our NOC where I work that I'm going to connect to a ubuntu linux box. The actual useful information (Nagios charts, internal monitoring stuff) is going to pretty much be all on one screen, so I'm going to fill the other screen with eye-candy and infoporn. Does anyone have any recommendations for software that'll display things like cool looking world maps of network outages and latency, or rss feeds, or even stuff that has absolutely no connection to network stuff like the Digg Labs gadgets or similar things for google news? I'm not really looking for anything useful, more stuff that's kind of screen saver-y, but also does have useful info if you actually look. I'd prefer to have stuff that's internet related, but really anything built of real time info would be useful to throw in the mix.

Also, as an aside, is there anyway to make Nagios status pages less drab looking?

Looking for a smooth function from noisy observations

Sockpuppet The First — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:46:24 -0800

Statsfilter: I have a bunch of noisy measurements. Each has an (x,y) coordinate and a "score" for that location. Most of the scores are trustworthy, but with the occasonal outlier. I want to come up with a function f(x,y) that estimates what the score at (x, y) would be (whether or not I have an observation at exactly that location). I'd like the function to be smooth and resilient to noise. Can someone point me in the right direction? I'm thinking of something like a kernel density estimator that takes the score into account, but I don't know how to make that work since it estimates density rather than some other value.

Using Google Visualization API with PHP

remi — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:20:30 -0800

I heard the Google Visualization API Query Language allows you to query Google Spreadsheet documents using a language similar to SQL. Is there a PHP library I can get to use a Google Spreadsheet as a simple database table?

Name this fancy chart

Space Coyote — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:35:11 -0800

Is there a special name for a this type of chart, in this case it is one showing the nuclear fuel recycling capability of a CANDU reactor? Or do I just call it a flowchart, that happens to have a very visually appealing way of showing a complex cycle?

What about London should I map?

viewofdelft — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:23:05 -0800

What about London should I map? I'm in an Advanced GIS class for which I need to produce a final cartographic project. The project must begin in ArcGIS but from there I'm free to use anything else (Illustrator, Flash, Google Earth, etc). In the spirit of John Snow, I'd like to make my upcoming trip to London a force for academic good.

I have a GPS unit, a DSLR camera, a student's budget, and a winning personality. What should I map? I'm open to all suggestions as long as they meet the following criteria:

1) The map should present complex and interesting information. I'm not too worried about this one because questions soliciting suggestions on this site often generate very interesting answers.

2) The project/map should be focused. I'll be in London for only a week and I'd like to make the data collection effort into a sort of overarching theme for my visit. That means I should probably confine my map to one neighborhood or area (I'm staying in Soho, but don't let that restrict you).

3) The data can come from any (accessible) source. I'd like to have a little fun gathering the data, but if your suggestions for a map can just as easily be constructed with data from other sources, I'd be happy to hear them. I live in the United States, so any return trips are out of the question this semester.

Thanks in advance. If I choose to go with one of the suggestions, I'll keep you updated.

Put it on the big screen, Scottie.

trinity8-director — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:46:44 -0800

What was this cool visualization ability I had for a while? Normally my visualization/memory/dreaming is dark and indistinct. Last year during a period of a few weeks I had brief episodes that were dramatically different. Here's what happened:

During the process of falling asleep I would hold my eyes completely steady and look through them at my closed eyelids (as opposed to seeing with the mind's eye). After several minutes I would suddenly 'pop' into a completely imaginary scene.

To say that it was vivid does no justice; it was absolutely like being there. If I moved my eyes at all, I would 'pop out' and be present in bed -- this was terribly difficult to avoid because of all the visual activity in the scenes. I could usually pop back to the scene fairly quickly, though.

Questions:
1. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
2. Where can I get more info on it?
3. If I can visualize like this during these conditions, why don't I visualize like that all the time?
4. Is there a way to develop wide-awake visualization to that degree?

I haven't been able to do this since then and would like to experience it some more and experiement with it. I don't think this is lucid dreaming since I haven't fallen asleep yet.

Help me create a visualization of a corporate family tree

blahblahblah — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:00:44 -0800

I need help putting some data in a pleasing graphical form. In short, it is a history of a particular industry, with all of the companies, their founders and where they came from. I would like to build some sort of corporate family tree like this famous one. Does anyone know any good tools for this?

I can has pretty graphs?

bkudria — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:48:36 -0800

What is a cool-looking realtime pluggable visualization program for Linux? I'm on a team working on building a cluster, and we'd like some nice real-time visualization of CPU load, and other things. Right now we are using KDE's ksysguard which gives us nice bar graphs and plots CPU usage - but it won't let us monitor custom things, like, for example, the number of files in a specified directory.

We would like something that is realtime, which kinda rules out all the web-based tools, and something that allows us to easily modify it to monitor anything we want. Furthermore, we need it to be able to monitor remote hosts, like ksysguard does (it does it with a daemon, or over ssh).