I'm grabbing lunch (well, at this point, finishing lunch) at my desk and mulling over the topic of data visualization. Recently I mentioned to a friend that I liked maps, and he sent me to this link to a map by Charles Joseph Minard. This shows the size and location of Napoleon's army and the low temperatures during the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.
It's more of a graph than a map and amazingly innovative, especially considering it was first published in 1869.
Then today I came across this interesting data visualization blog. It shows how artist/educator, Jer Thorp used the open source "processing" engine to visualize New York Times data. (New York Times has open APIs, who knew?) Looking at the cool graphs, it is enough to get me back into coding for a spell. I'm pondering what I want to use as my source data, what story I want to tell, and how much of my weekend I will dedicate to it. Yes, I know, I'm living the dream.
These data visualization links got me thinking about Worlde, which produces tag clouds that visualize the frequency of word usage. I loaded in the data that we collected during our recent interviews in Houston and Calgary to see what the tag cloud would look like. After minimal massaging, the tag cloud came out like this:
Not surprisingly, Model, File, Project, Drawing and Specs took top billing as data "words". Surprisingly, Newfoundland got more of a front & center placement than expected. This clearly needs more research. Neat, no?
Comments