Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with visualization

Can you identify this unusual neurological (?) reading phenomenon?

zresearch — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:33:29 -0800

It's when "words fall away to pictures" occasionally , perhapps particularly when reading the text of physical books, usually novels, of a large size. It doesn't happen with reading online or e-book readers or textbooks. It's as if the visual imagination (without deliberate activation) overrides what's actually been seen by the eyes, so that the story unfolding is actually being "watched" in the mind's eye in an immersive, vivid way where one becomes virtually unaware of the actual text print and the outside world (so it's not even like watching a movie in a cinema, where there is more consciousness of the real surroundings). This is not just getting immersed in reading - the strong, and not deliberately activated, visualization is crucial. Based on anecdotal evidence, what I'm describing (not from my personal experience) appears to be a rarer rather than a common experience. Anyone have ideas what this neurological (?) trait might be?

Silent Science Videos To Entertain Teens?

The Whelk — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:26:02 -0800

Looking for videos to create a youtube playlist to entertain a group of science-minded teenagers for about 30 min that are largely visual. Sound is fine but the bulk shouldn't be someone talking to the class like an instructor - visualizations are best - ideally they should look really, really cool. Class is engineering focused, but chemistry, robotics, wobbly bridges, comp-sci, biology, are all welcome. Backstory: the kids are going to be holed up in a room for a while without their phones, the projector will be playing a pre-selected set of youtube videos.

What are the cutting edge data visualization tools out there right now?

Rodrigo Lamaitre — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 11:42:23 -0800

I am handy with HTML, CSS and a little Javascript. I also have a lot of experience with Wordpress theme development. What is the best path for me to become an ace data visualizer on the web? When I was in university, I got really familiar with building Wordpress sites, HTML, CSS and Javascript. I haven't really kept up with programming for a number of years but historically found myself fairly comfortable with new languages.

I've since become an economist, and part of what I am trying to do is develop a more flexible toolkit for presenting data and text. I like the infographic style and would love to be able to produce articles on the web using that format with relative ease. Ideally, I'd love to build this into existing Wordpress blogs too, but that's not necessarily something I'm married to.

What tools should I be using? Generally, I will be developing my data using Excel or SPSS, so something that is relatively easy to import data and produce stunning charts would be great. On my "god I wish it existed" list would be a tool that would be able to replicate bar charts with importable images - so, instead of a bar that goes to 100, I would love something that would stack, say, a car for every 10 in the dataset (so 10 cars for 100.)

What tools do you think I should be using? I am assuming some scripting will be necessary and I am comfortable with that, but the more out of the box, the better. I have never been good at graphic design so the less of that, the better, unless there's a great guide to get me up to speed.

Crash course in freelancing please

PercussivePaul — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 17:13:04 -0800

Some freelance programming/design work (javascript data visualization) is about to drop into my lap through a friend who has heard me talking about how much I enjoy this stuff. I'm a student and have never done this professionally, but would love to in the future. Help me not look like a rookie and make this go smoothly and professionally. Doing the work is not a problem. I have a ballpark idea of what their budget is and how long it will take me and I think we will be able to agree on the rate. I'm more thinking about the sort of typical practices that freelancers would do. Such as:

Contracts? Is there a good resource for boilerplate?

Payment? How do freelancers get paid? Paypal? Mailed cheques? What's a good invoice look like?

Taxes? Do I need to worry about this now and factor it into my rate, or just worry about it when I file my tax return? I'm in Canada.

Work-in-progress? It will have to live on the web, so I am going to throw up a website so I can show the client work as we go. Maybe have a password-protected section so they know the work is not published. Is there a good framework for this kind of thing? Also, anyone know a good web host ($5/month?) for basic PHP/Python/MySQL type projects?

Ownership/licensing/credit/portfolio? I assume once I produce the stuff they want and we've worked out delivery and deployment, I just give them all the code and they can do what they like with it. Is that standard practice? Do I ask for an authorship credit or anything like that? If I want to host a copy as part of a portfolio is it okay to ask for that, and does this affect the rate I would charge?

What else am I forgetting? I figured I would eventually research all of this but my schedule has been suddenly accelerated and I need to be up and running really soon.

Automata simulators?

advil — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:42:30 -0800

What are the best automata (formal language theory) simulators? This is mainly for teaching purposes. I have used JFLAP in past iterations of the class in question, and my google searches suggest this is still the best option, but I was wondering if there is anything newer and better that I'm not finding. Details below. Ideal: can do DFAs, NFAs, PDAs, Turing machines, and at least some grammar formalisms. I would love tools that could demo some of the more obscure machines as well (e.g. two-tape turing machines, linear bounded automata, etc) but asking for a lot of these is probably hoping for too much; JFLAP has the best coverage of any of these apps that I know. I would prefer something cross-platform so students can run it themselves, but will consider anything, even ipad apps if they exist. I'm also interested in hearing about specialized tools that do one or a few kinds of machines very well, or have especially pretty visualization, or whatever.

Also, because this is coming up in searches a lot, I'm not interesting in cellular automata simulators. I'm aware that JFLAP is working on a redesign but the class will be long over by their projected release date.

Chart help needed: How to show proportion between two values?

Sock Ray Blue — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:48:41 -0800

What type of chart do I want to show that one number is several times as many as another? Putting a tall bar representing value x next to short bar representing value y shows that x is greater than y by x-y. (I realize that's a bit of an oversimplification.) What's the best way to show that x is greater than y by x/y times? I would love some examples.

Bonus question that I should really know the answer to: if x-y is the "linear" relationship, what is x/y? Neither the "geometric" relationship nor the "proportional" relationship sound right to me.

Where is the site that does neat code archaeology on git repos?

bleary — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 07:37:45 -0800

It's a visualization tool that analyses history of a code base to do some archaeology so you know who to talk to if you have questions about that section -- I swear I saw this somewhere recently, in the past week or so. I thought I bookmarked it because it was neat. I can't find it. What's the url? maybe it was some fancy git blame thing.

Visualize 6 Pages in 1 Slide?

Apropos of Something — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 18:11:26 -0800

How do I visualize the content of six pages on one PowerPoint slide? Graphical palpability preferred. I'm giving my first academic conference talk in a month - it's on a lit review I wrote that includes a six page table, with detailed information about each of the articles reviewed. My advisor thinks I should briefly demonstrate in the presentation that the table exists - though, obviously, I can't talk through all its content. (Audience members will be able to pick up the full paper to read it).

I can't think of a good way to create a visual of these six pages. The visual should show enough detail to indicate that there are six pages, and that they're full of content, but doesn't need to be more detailed than that. How should I show this? Recommendations on both programs and techniques taken.

How to categorize curve patterns?

lord_yo — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 07:50:52 -0800

Statistics filter: How can I categorize time series curves into pattern categories? I have a time series measurement with a variable over 6 measurements. Each time series for an individual case creates a curve with a pattern - e.g. staying constant, decreasing over time, falling and rising again, etc.

I would like to cluster these curves into pattern categories, but don't know how.

What I've done so far is simplify the pattern based on a threshold of gain and loss, i.e. if the curve rises by X% between t0 and t1 it's a gain (/), if it falls by X% it's a loss (\), otherwise it's a horizontal movement (-). That gives me 6^3 = 216 possible patterns, such as:

------
--\\\-
-//-\-

Some of them are similar and probably belong into the same category (such as --\--- and ---\--).

Is there a better, easier way than clustering the curves by hand? Is there a more sophisticated way of finding patterns, i.e. based on more than just "rising", "falling", "horizontal"?

It's hard to Google infographics

glass origami robot — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:07:47 -0800

I'm looking for an infographic (?) about how lucky it is to have been born in the developed world. I remember a format similar to "If you are also literate, then you are already in the top x% of the world," with various characteristics substituted in for "literate." I'm not sure where I saw this; possibly MetaFilter. I'm also not sure if it was actually an infographic or just a series of statistics.

How do I stop WinAmp from displaying the song title in the Visualizations window?

Trurl — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:02:08 -0800

How do I stop WinAmp from displaying the song title in the Visualizations window?

Got to Find a Peace of Mind

livinglearning — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:51:58 -0800

I'm having trouble searching for this on Google. But, I'd like to know more about the inner workings of the mind. I'm looking for scholarly articles or anecdotes that discuss how people's minds work. I'm primarily looking for details about how vivid images are in people's minds and how close thoughts feel in someone's head. Recently, I was told by my psychiatrist that people don't see images vividly to the point where it's like a movie that is being played. That definitely surprised me because I always used that as a reference for how my mind should function once I start healing from dissociation.

But, apparently, that's not a realistic reference for myself. I know that feeling like my mind is hollow and with very distanced thoughts and rarely any images in my mind isn't 'normal' either.

My psychiatrist told me that I will just know when my mind is functioning back to my definition of 'normal.' But, I'd like to know more about the inner workings of the mind.

Please let me know of any scholarly articles that discuss the inner workings of the mind from both a traumatized and non-traumatized perspective. I've had a difficult time searching for these articles through Google. If you have any personal stories then I'd like to hear those too.

Questions that I'm looking to explore include: What does the inside of someone's traumatized mind look like? How does it function? What about someone that has not experienced any traumatic experiences? How vivid are images? How distant are thoughts?

visualize this

leigh1 — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:19:54 -0800

How would one visualize 3 parametars on the same graph? I have to visualize my sleeping schedule (time + day) + alternations of my body temperature during the day on the same graph. How could it be done?

Envisioning a syllabus on the Display of Quantitative Information

rapidadverbssuck — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:36:35 -0800

I am planning on teaching a course on data visualization to some Ph.D. students in the social sciences, and could use some ideas about designing the syllabus. If you have taken or taught such a course, I would especially value your input, but I would also love to hear from any among you who have experience doing data visualization. To clarify, I expect to emphasize statistical graphics and (to some extent) multidimensional, large-n data display, while entirely avoiding "infographics." Also, Tufte -- at least The Visual Display of Quantitative Information -- goes without saying.

I have some ideas of my own, but it I think it would be useful to gather from a wider range of experience before getting started. I've come up with a list of specific questions, but I would be happy to read any relevant suggestions.

= What is the best way to structure such a class? What topics need to be covered, and in what order?

= What book chapters and articles should students read? What are the canonical papers on statistical graphics?

= Are there any discipline-specific visualization papers from your area of interest that could serve as good (or bad) examples of designing graphics with a specific purpose in mind?

= I am expecting to have them work and develop projects in R, but what types of weekly assignments and semester-long projects would be most useful?

= Are there good examples of such syllabi available online for reference? If any of you have taken such a course, what was useful, and what was not?

Thanks for your time and ideas!

Looking for metaphorical images to divert attention during childbirth

Xalf — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:55:02 -0800

Please suggest, preferably with specific links, images that are metaphors for birth to be used for focusing on and creating visualizations during labor. Baby Xalf is arriving next month! One of the many comfort measures suggested in Penny Simkin's The Birth Partner is Attention Focusing, which "diverts the mother's mind from her pain by having her concentrate on something else." Baby Xalf's mom has lots of ideas for what something else could be, but I thought I'd try to create some other options by printing up ten or so images of inspiring metaphors for pregnancy. I have some obvious ideas, like space shuttle launches or locomotives, but I'm open to more subtle ideas (especially ideas that are not so stereotypically male!). Links to specific images are great, copyright free images are greater.

P.S. Please don't be shy about sharing relevant personal experiences from your labor.

P.P.S. I am absolutely prepared for this idea to not in fact be of any help to Baby Xalf's mom. We are practicing lots of other comfort measures.

Suggestion for information designers to train?

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:04:07 -0800

Any recommendations for information designers or visualizers to do trainings for the large research company for which I work? I work for a pretty large market research company doing qualitative analysis. We have a number of qualitative researchers who conduct focus groups and lead interviews, then present their findings in PowerPoint reports. The content of these reports is good, but we are looking to make major improvements to the design and visual layout. To that end, we're undertaking a few initiatives to increase the overall visual quality of our reports. For one of these initiatives, I've been tasked with finding a presentation/information designer or visual/design thinking expert to come in and lead a couple of short training sessions for our researchers and analysts.

This is a qualitative group, and as such, we’re not interested in translating numeric data into visuals, but rather illustrating and presenting flows of text-based content and accompanying images. We need a training session that would focus on overall visual thinking, working with visual models, and how to come up with visual models to help with the flow of such content. We’re not just looking for someone to present a bunch of examples of good design – we’re looking for a trainer who could give our staff the tools and means to do this themselves, helping people who don’t consider themselves visual people to be more visual in their reports. Any ideas?

We're located on the east coast of the US, if that makes a difference.

Also, a number of our present researchers might be slightly resistant to the idea of changing their method of work, so we're looking for a trainer(s) who knows how to teach even those folks who insist that they're "not visual."

Please send any private followup correspondence to presentationdesignmefiquestion@gmail.com

Thanks!

How can easily I turn this CSV data into something more visual?

Decimask — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:21:48 -0800

I'm looking for some free software that will help me turn the CSV export from the Android time tracking app Gleeo into some simple visualizations (multicoloured horizontal bars?) without a huge amount of work. The data includes things like the start and end times, as well as categories ("projects") and tasks within each project. I'm not looking for anything crazy fancy, I'm just curious if I'll be able to pick out trends in my workflow by visualizing it.

PROJECT   TASK      DETAILS   START              END                DURATION  Decimal Duration

ILS       Meeting   -         2012-01-10 08:43   2012-01-10 10:21   1:38      1.6333333333

Can you exercise your imagination to move very fast? and is there a paper on that, sort of?

bleary — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:25:02 -0800

Can people visualize themselves moving faster than they are physically capable of moving? Back in the stone ages when I was in college taking some psyc classes, I vaguely remember hearing about a study where subjects visualized(?) navigating to a location. They timed the task, and it matched up with the walking speed of the person. Am I completely confabulating this? I can't think of good enough search terms to find an article about it. speaking of which, mental time travel, pulls up interesting articles.

Anyhoo, I really would love to find a paper on that experiment, if it exists. And then on to the stupid second part of the question. sometimes I am semi lucid in a dream and want to shift my perception to a different location in the scene. I can't seem to imagine myself just showing up there (like teleporting). So I was wondering if there would be a way to exercise my imagination so that I could move of shift perception to a location faster than I can literally move.

Compelling or interesting uses of municipal open data

parudox — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:05:41 -0800

What are the most compelling or interesting uses of municipal open data? I am looking for examples of visualizations, sites, apps or other uses that show the utility and potential of open data from municipal governments (other data sources can also work). Striking examples are good, though particularly interesting are connections between unexpected data sets, uses outside the usual (e.g. transit, maps), and things that are not just cool but somehow useful, either to the public or to the provider of the data.

Looking for online tools for making nice data visualizations.

HE Amb. T. S. L. DuVal — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:48:46 -0800

Are there online resources that will let an amateur make slick, professional infographics, graphs, charts or images+text? Or communities of designers that do quick, topical visualization challenges? Further details inside. For infographics, there is Visual.ly, but they haven't released tools to actually create infographics yet. Vizualize.me takes a LinkedIn resume and turns it into a visual representation - that's more along the lines of what I'm looking for. (without it being resume-focused)

For charts and graphs there is Google's Public Data Explorer and IBM's Many Eyes. There's also Hohli. Are any of these good for the non-specialist? Are there any services, on this list or not, that are particularly good?

For image+text, I'm looking for something sort of like a meme generator, but with more variability in terms of where the text is placed and the font. I want users to be able to upload a picture of, say, Andrew Jackson, and then add a quote of his in a font other than Impact. Hosting and sharing capabilities for the resultant images would be a nice bonus.

I know that not paying designers to design is bad form, but are there any sites where designers take on challenges for making infographics, etc.? It would be something like the Photoshop competitions on Fark, or even the more kindhearted ones on Reddit, but with a more serious or political tone.

Thanks, hive mind!

Nice visuals from software project

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:04:53 -0800

I'm looking for a way to generate something aesthetically pleasing from a somewhat successful software project I'm involved in, with an eye to giving it as a gift to the project manager. Source data I can think of is a SVN repository with ~10000 commits, a repository of a few thousand data objects and connections between them, and job logs also containing a few thousand entries over the last couple of years.

I'm aware of codeswarm and the Mapping the Internet people. Do you know of any other awesome tools or have ideas how to create beautiful artifacts from timeline/graph data? I have ample computing resources and tech skills at my disposal, but probably not large sums of money.

Anonymous because I don't want to spoil it in case the addressee surprisingly reads the green as well.

Seeking understanding and tools I need to design a homepage that is a dynamic bar chart.

iamkimiam — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:37:19 -0800

This weekend I'm setting up a website for an academic event. I'd like the homepage of the site to have large, clickable progress bars that display the number of posts for each of the subpages (News & Announcements, Blog, Events, etc.). As more posts are added to each of the subpages (posts would likely be sorted and displayed by category and tag), its respective progress bar takes up more screen real estate and the tally count listed on/near it increases. Basically, I want the homepage to look like a giant, dynamic bar chart. Is there a freeware (or cheap) template, widget or piece of code that allows me to do this? One aspect of the event theme is visualization and free, easy implementation of available tools, so we want to create the event (website, etc.) in the same form. And I have no budget. I could also use all the help, suggestions and resources I can find for how to hack apart an almost-there template (oh, where are you, almost-there template?), including which platform (Blogger or Wordpress) would be best suited for doing this. For example, doing something similar in the past, I remember there was a browser tool that let you change the code and see the result as you codey-changy...what was that called? What other tools do I need?

My plan is to hunker down this weekend and build this thing (and learn a bunch of other things in the process). I have a well-defined design layout/plan. I'm also rudimentarily familiar with both blogging platforms, widgets, basic HTML, SQL, some CSS and computer/internet things more generally.

How to untie a trefoil knot?

knz — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:58:28 -0800

Mathematics/Topology: how to untie a trefoil knot in four dimensions? To my general understanding all 3d knots are not really knots four dimensions; practically I thought this simply involved looking at the process of tying the knot over time, and observing that the process is reversible -- that there is thus no point in 4d at which the simple string "unknot" is fundamentally changed to a knot.

However when I looked at the trefoil knot this understanding fell to pieces. Obviously there is no process to build a trefoil that starts from an untied string without changing its topology fundamentally (by closing the ends together).

Hence my question: probably the trefoil knot is still no knot in 4d, but how so? Can you point me to any resource which helps visualizing the topology of a trefoil in 4d?

Dusting Off the Ol' Slide Rule

richyoung — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:55:02 -0800

What are the best math instructional sites, resources and (especially) tools for graphing and math visualization these days? It's been over 20 years since my mathematical high-water-mark (college calculus), but I'm trying to get the ol' brain back in shape. I'm working my way through algebra, geometry, and trig once more, with the goal of eventually getting through calculus in a classroom again. Also, I'm a homeschool parent and my kids aren't that far behind, so this question might help me teach them, too.

Back in the day, we had non-graphing calculators and had to do all of our visualization on graph paper or mentally. Outside of class time, our resources were limited to the textbook and the teacher's office hours. I hear a lot's changed -- something about "computers" and an "information superhighway"? What are some good online & software tools for helping me get it as I pursue these goals?

I love Vi Hart, but she's more dessert than main course. I've dipped my toe into the waters of Khan Academy and found it helpful, but it seems to lack the organizational layer a textbook would have. I've heard of Wolfram Alpha but don't really know where to start. Tips on getting the most out of these resources are welcome, as are any stuff I haven't heard of. Free preferred, but excellent paid resources welcome too.

For the record, my primary computer is running Linux, but I have access to machines running Win7 and MacOSX, too.

What are some 3D puzzles?

Giggilituffin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:39:48 -0800

What are some activities that exercise visual or structural type thinking? Something to do with science, technology, or 3-dimensions preferred. I'm looking for puzzles, hobbies, or other activities that might be performed through an actual job that I'm just not aware of. As examples, auto-mechanics classes and memorizing anatomy books immediately comes to mind.