Robert Kosara, a computer science professor at UNC – Charlotte developed a number of charts to illustrate the impact of smoking on health.
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Also, there is a second year MFA student, Steve Lucin, whom I haven’t had an opportunity to speak with, who wanted to explore obituary data in a visually graphic way.
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As a jumping off point:
In journalism, we recognize a kind of hierarchy of fame among the famous. We measure it in two ways: by the length of an obituary and by how far in advance it is prepared.
-Walter Cronkite
The raw chart:
click img to see it bigger
The final chart:
click img to see it bigger
The grey bars represent the ten longest obituaries of the last 7 months. From left to right, they are:
“A Star Idolized and Haunted, Michael Jackson Dies at 50″ (2839 words)
“Jack Nelson, an Investigative Reporter, Dies at 80″ (1266 words)
“Dominick Dunne, Writer Who Chronicled High-Profile Crime, Is Dead at 83″ (1966 words)
“Robert Rines, Inventor and Monster Hunter, Dies at 87″ (2839 words)
“Howard Unruh, 88, Dies; Killed 13 of His Neighbors in Camden in 1949″ (1304 words)
“Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89″ (1485 words)
“Walter Cronkite, 92, Dies; Trusted Voice of TV News” (2968 words)
“Budd Schulberg, ‘On the Waterfront’ Writer, Dies at 95″ (1855 words)
“Henrich, Yankees Clutch Hitter, Dies at 96″ (1086 words)
“Bela Kiraly Dies at 97; Led Revolt In Hungary” (1136 words)
Notable outliers are:
Michael Jackson, receiving a 2839 word obituary at the age of 50 (Billy Mays is the other 50 year old). Jack Rose, the youngest recipient of a NYTimes obituary. Along with Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite received a very long obituary that ran 50% longer than the two next longest obituaries.
Haven’t fully migrated the site from http://a.parsons.edu/~linc184/blog/ just yet! Interface posts pretty much squared away, but Data Viz & Motion projects aren’t yet done.
This is a response to “The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives” by Christiane Paul.
The main focus of Paul’s paper is the idea of Database Aesthetics and how there are a multitude of ways for artists, designers, and programmers to interpret data (in databases) and reorganize them in creative and interesting ways. In designing the front-end visualization, new forms can emerge out of the data and connections and trends may be much more readily be seen. What’s interesting is that while many of the students, including myself, are interested in using data visualization as a means towards the goal of social commentary/illumination of social issues, nearly all of Paul’s examples fall into the realm of data-as-art: searching for interesting patterns and visually stunning structures.
This is a response to “Data-Ink and Graphic Redesign”, a chapter from Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte.
I really enjoyed this straightforward look at the topic of how much information is necessary to include in a graphic in relation to the amount of non-information. The balance between the two, he dubs the data-ink ratio. Through the use of several graphs (and various edits of each) he comes very clearly illustrates a number of his suggestions to would be data visualizers. His points are: reduce non-essential and redundant data in order to highlight the data and maximize the data-ink ratio. To this end, he also points out that we all must remember to create revisions and make edits.