Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Visualizing the visualization

A recent article on my brother's blog (Vabalog) directed me to a very interesting site which gives a nice overview of different data visualization methods – The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. I think this table is a nice reference tool for the History and Visions of New Media course and anybody who is interested in visualizing data using new media. Just roll your mouse over any of the "elements" and you see an example of the visualization method. Neat!

You've probably seen most of the visualizations at some point or another but I for one could only name a handful of methods. But as you can see from the chart they all have unique names... I especially like the "heaven 'n' hell chart".

Side note: A special thanks to Nate Weaver for his excellent little app Paparazzi! which enabled me to take a full-scale screenshot of the webpage.