TagCrowd: "make your own tag cloud from any text"

I haven't been a big fan of tag clouds because to me they belabor the obvious and aren't a particularly useful way to navigate a Web site, but you may feel differently after checking out TagCrowd. With TagCrowd you can point to any Web page, upload a file or paste text in a box and instantly generate a tag cloud, which you can then embed on your own Web pages.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

• as topic summaries for speeches and written works
• for visual analysis of survey data
• as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
• for data mining a text corpus
• for helping writers and students reflect on their work
• as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
• as resumes in a single glance
• as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.

Here's one I made using a story on a school lunch price increase by Antoinette Konz in today's paper:

 

affect antoinette beasley board bread breakfast cents children choose costs county crunch cup delivered department district eat elementary extra food force fuel half having higher increase jefferson kids konz less level lunch meals middle offered pay prices raise receive rising rolls school since students sturgeon supply think three-eighths used year

created at TagCrowd.com

Get a free Sitepoint Photoshop book

You have 28 days to get the book, The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques." You submit your email address to them and they send back a link that allows you to download it as a PDF.

SportsDesigner.com: 2007 Sports Designer of the Year

SportsDesigner.com unveiled its "2007 Sports Designer of the Year" this month.

 

 

You should also check out the winners of its best infographics contest.

[via Infographics News]

Document Contrast Diagrams

Neoformix explains a Document Contrast Diagram comparing the president's 2007 and 2008 State of the Union speeches:

A Document Contrast Diagram is a visual summary of the content of two text documents that illustrates shared words, words that are unique to one document or the other, word frequency, relative size of the two documents, distribution of emotional tone within the documents, related words based on co-occurence, and the most common word in each document segment.

No explanation of how to create such a thing, though.

Edward Tufte's Ask E.T. forum

Edward Tufte, "the Galileo of graphics," as a Business Week quote displayed prominently on Tufte's Web site labels him, regularly answers questions about information design. Current topics include "Sparklines: theory and practice," "Graphing Software," "Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations" and "Mapping election results."

Illustrating quantity

A bar chart is empty of emotion, with the number 3 delivering the same impact as 300 million. That isn't true of this series of images by Chris Jordan called "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait":

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Derby DataTrack and Many Eyes: 2008 Kentucky Derby contenders, trainers and sires

This weekend we released the latest version of Derby DataTrack, our database of potential contenders for the Kentucky Derby. I know we (read: I) can do a better job presenting this data, but I haven't yet figured out how. A while ago ManyEyes added a network visualization tool and a way of embedding their visualizations on any Web site, so I thought I'd give it a try:

While this is intriguing, this isn't the solution, so if you have any thoughts on how we can do better that don't involve mastering Flash or Processing in a week, drop me a note.

The New York Times and "Playgrounds for Data"

Cyberjournlaist.net pointed me to this article by Jared M. Spool at User Interface Engineering, who says the New York Times is "a leader in creating interactive modules to accompany their news stories, often yielding in an impressive and fun experience":

Every organization sits on a ton of data. Making that data useful is a constant challenge for designers.

By looking at what the NYTimes interactive team has done, often with very small time frames, we can see examples of what is possible. From their work, we can learn new ways of presenting complex information in fun and engaging ways.

Spool also wrote about "Playful Data: 3 Inspiring Interactive Web Sites":

It feels to us that we're just at the beginning of what will likely be a revolution in how we handle large data sets. The applications we're seeing now are just the tip of the iceberg. The real value will be when we see these types of playful data tools in almost every application we touch. For those of us who like to play with our data, we're about to have some real fun.

Dispensational Charts

Don't let the fact that two books I read recently were God is Not Great and The God Delusion dissuade you from viewing these "Dispensational Charts" by Clarence Larkin first published more than 75 years ago. They illustrate topics such as The Heavens, The Failure of Man and The Underworld.

The books and charts by Clarence Larkin have been extremely helpful to Christians since they were first published over 75 years ago. They have passed into the public domain and we are making some of the charts available here as an aid to Bible study. Larkin's charts are well thought out and Scriptually sound. Some of the more detailed are books in themselves. They reveal Larkin's vast knowledge of the Scriptures and phenomenal grasp of prophecy. Practically all of the prophecy teachers today got their basic prophecy knowledge directly or indirectly from Larkin and C. I. Scolfield. Larkin's works, as well as Scolfield's, are definitive, works that will endure until Christ's return. No other book since their publishing over 75 years ago has much improved on them.

information aesthetics notes that "while appearing sparse at first" they "seem to pack a lot of information into a concise format."

Make Google Charts with URLs

Yesterday Google released a tool that lets you make bar, pie, line and scatterplot charts and Venn diagrams just by specifying the information in a URL. You can then embed the charts in a Web page.

Here's an example:

The URL to create this chart looks like this:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x

That looks nasty, but here's how it breaks down:

cht=bvs
makes a vertical bar chart

chs=200x125
specifies the chart size in pixels

chco=ff0000
is the chart color

chd=t:70,66,55,73
is  data for the chart. In this case the number of homicides in Louisville per year (I haven't checked this carefully, so assume the numbers are imaginary)

chtt=Homicides
the chart title

chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007
the chart axis label

chxt=x
The location of the label. In this case, on the x axis.

To include the chart on a Web page, you include the URL as the src attribute in an HTML image tag, like so:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chs=200x125&chco=ff0000&chd=t:70,66,55,73&chtt=Homicides&chxl=0:|2004|2005|2006|2007&chxt=x" />

There are many, many options, so you can make some pretty sophisticated charts, plotting up to a maximum of 4,096 values. Google says it originally built this tool for Google Finance.

Google limits you to 50,000 queries per user per day, so I'm not sure it's useful for a newspaper site, but that's more than enough for most blogs and personal Web sites.

Chart Chooser

Juice Analytics' Chart Chooser helps you figure out what type of chart is appropriate for your data. You can then download a ready-made Excel or Powerpoint template to create it.

Designing Visualizations for Time-Based Data

Max Kiesler shares his list of "some of the best time-based visualizations on the web":

Most interaction designers understand the concept of timelines and other time-based data. Blogs, calendars, and to-do lists are all examples of time-based data. However, if you are trying to fit 400 data points into a 1024 x 726 screen you'll quickly see how challenging time-base data can be. Currently, many interaction designers are turning to visualizations to overcome many of the issues associated with this form of data representation.

Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go

The Budget Graph is the home of "A Visual Guide to Your Federal Taxes":

"Death and Taxes" is a large representational graph of the federal budget. It contains over 400 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2008 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their spending totals and the percentage change from 2007 is included to spot trends and disproportion.

This is the second year for this graphic, which you can purchase as a poster or view online.

"40 Best Open Source Graphic Programs"

snap2objects ("DesignTips+Freebies+Inspiration") names them.

"16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools"

... that Mashable says are "both visually stunning and delightfully useful."

Visuwords

Visuwords is an "online graphical dictionary." It visually represents a word, showing what type of word it is, words it's similar to, its derivation and more.

3D graphics with GE-Graph

The free GE-Graph plots data graphically on Google Earth. Here's an example: I took 2000 Census data on median home price household income by ZIP code for our circulation area, used Microsoft Access to combine it with a file that gave the latitude and longitude for each ZIP code, and cut and pasted it into GE-Graph. GE-Graph can also import data from a file or you can type it in, and it has various options for choosing colors, labels and transforming the data. You then click "Run" and it exports the data as KML, Google's mapping format. This was the result:

The taller the bar and the darker the color, the higher the median home price median income. You can zoom in and out and rotate the graphic to view it from different angles in Google Earth. This is a kind of poor man's 3D Analyst Extension, which does this and much, much more, but costs $2,495.

UPDATE: Oops. The perils of working too fast and not taking enough time to check your work: I mistakenly uploaded a 3D image of home prices instead of median income, so I've corrected this post to reflect that.

pic2color

Feed pic2color the URL of an image and it will return the color scheme.

Database of information graphics

Infovis offers "1200+ examples of information visualization."

The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) is building this searchable database of information graphics from visitor submissions and numerous repositories on the internet. It was begun as an internal resource for PIIM employees, as a purely academic endeavor (all sources are cited). Part of our research program is to classify these and other information graphics according to a taxonomy under development.

As the database has grown, we felt that it could serve as a generally useful resource. We are accepting submissions with the goal of establishing the most comprehensive, manually annotated (and taxonomically classified) information graphics database in the world.

Pictures of Numbers

Pictures of Numbers is a blog that offers "Techniques for improving your data graphics." It is by Mike Dickison, a Zoology graduate student who runs information design workshops at Duke University.