Tag : data visualisation

This is the second post in an ongoing series of interviews with ‘interesting’ people that the Made by Many crew find either inspiring, exciting, confusing or otherwise of note.

Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist and data visualiser. Her site at www.itsbeenreal.co.uk is a veritable feast of lovely interestingness. If you had to sum her up, it might be beautifier of literature as this is a key focus of both her ‘real’ job and some of her data projects (which includevisualisations of things like Kerouac’s On The Road and OK Go’s latest album cover)

Sit back and enjoy an intimate (email) interview with Stefanie:

The power and beauty of data visualization is something that the crew at Made By Many always get excited about.

Making previously ‘invisible’ information visible, not to mention aesthetically stunning, is a fascinating and rapidly growing field.

So I’m super-delighted to let you know that Manuel Lima, all-round dataviz guru, curator of the brilliant Visual Complexity blog, and recent TED speaker, will be speaking in London at BBH’s offices next Tuesday 25 August between 3.30-4.30pm.

Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin gave a talk at BBH London yesterday which, being in the same building, we were lucky enough to be able to attend. 

Aaron took us through his work, from his student days at UCLA where he worked on projects including the visualization of US flight patterns, to his work at Yahoo! and now Google Creative Labs (I’m sure some of you have seen the collapsing Google page experiments, which can be seen at Chrome Experiments - there are tons more and some of them are a lot of fun to look at, so you should!). A lot of his work, which you can find on his site, uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a platform to channel the participation of thousands of people from across the world, all working in isolation from one another and with very limited knowledge of the projects they were working on. As Aaron mentioned, the interesting thing was to see how crowdsourcing in this manner is a good example of the sum of the parts being more intelligent than the individual parts themselves – a principle expounded on by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of the Crowds.

Data. It’s the word on everyone’s lips and… err fingertips. Yes, we all dream about getting our hands dirty with data nowadays. I’ve read a number of excellent blog posts and seen some killer presentations on the subject over the past few days and I thought I’d share. Because sharing is *good*.

The Battle Between Art & The Algorithm (by my brother Ben at BBH Labs). In this post Ben provocatively suggests that the rise and rise of algorithmically powered recommendation is robbing us of serendipity: “We’re talking about the end of surprise.” Having taken us to the edge of despair he then highlights some examples of things working pretty well (AKQA’s Halo 3 work, anything by Jonathan Harris – especially We Feel Fine.) What a tease.

I know March isn’t quite over yet but if I waited any longer, this list would have grown too big. So here goes:

1. Informapping: Interested in knowing which parts of the world have the most news stories on a map? Or maybe you want to look at new stories by geographical region? This is for you then.

2. My Twitter Weighs A Ton: How much does your Twitter account weigh?