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By Matthew Solle
 Data is the life blood of the communication channel we refer to as the Internet; its visualisation has become an area of, at times, radical innovation.
The online visualisation of data continues to stretch in many directions with great effectiveness. Inspired by seminal influences, such as Edward Tufte, there's an ever growing stream of online and offline tools, projects, research and resources for visualising, interpreting and researching ultimately any type of data, for a vast range of uses.
Long gone are the days when one had to struggle with Microsoft Excel or Adobe Illustrator to try and build some pie chart to support whatever you were endeavouring to communicate. Now, these endless possibilities of data presentation methods can seriously expand your work.
As an introduction and appraisal of all the available resources, I thought it most sensible to split them into three groups: online and offline tools producing immediate results; areas where developers, researchers, academics and artists are pushing the boundaries; and examples of highly developed and inspiring work - and run through either what can be done with each or what is being done. Hopefully, your interest will be suitably increased and I will then flag the best ways of keeping abreast of all data visualisation developments.
A: Online tools producing immediate results
Wordle is one of the most simple and intuitive tools for visualising any text as a Word Cloud. It's extremely easy to use and produces excellent results - the only thing you require is your creativity. You can play around with different fonts, layouts and colour and, if you like what you've produced, share it with the online community. All Wordle ask of you when using it is to credit it. The perfect foil for any blog posting or academic paper.
Figure 1 - Wordle
Touchgraph has two products. One is called Navigator for working with Excel spreadsheet data (and various other formats) and Touchgraph Google Browser that lets you visualise the connection between websites using the extraordinary power of Google. I have selected Touchgraph for the obvious reason that it works closely with Excel data which most people have somewhere on their computer. It's a good introduction to investigating what can be done with even the most seemingly dull series of figures. The Google Browser tool is again a good introduction to revisualising information that most of us touch on every day.
New York Times Visualisation Lab is powered by IBM's Many Eyes technology. The NYT is a hotbed of innovation and inspiring work (see Shan Carter below). Its ‘Viz Lab' allows you to input data or research selected by the NYT's editors and create powerful visual representations. There's obviously plenty of good data and the visual possibilities are very powerful but, if you want to work with your own data, visit IBM's Many Eyes where the possibilities, and the chance to work the visualisations for other audiences, continue. Take a look at the latest visualisations in both galleries and I'm sure you will be inspired.
Digg Labs (in collaboration with Stamen Design] who also produced the Travel Time Maps for MySociety offers a wonderfully visually stimulating way of following the high level of user activity on Digg in real time. You can watch within a browser or a selection can be downloaded as screensavers (in my estimation, the best screensavers available).
At present, there are five visual ‘labs' - Pics, tracking the level of picture activity on Digg; Arc displays activity wrapped around a sphere; BigSpy scrolls stories down the screen, the larger the font the more activity; Stack as stories are ‘dugg' they fall from the top of the screen and stack up on the most popular; and Swarm as a story is dugg, diggers swarm around stories and make them grow. Stamen has now released a public API so anyone can produce their own Digg visualisations.
B: Developers, researchers, academics and artists are pushing the boundaries
Pachube - to quote its About us page - ‘is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real-time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the Internet'. Obviously, the possibilities are endless and users are already doing things like wiring up things like their fridges to the web and mixing the data with other data like pollution levels. Request a beta login if you are interested.
Processing is an open source programming language and environment created to teach the fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool for artists, designers, researchers and hobbyists to program images, animation and interactions. See Ben Fry below for examples and also the Processing Gallery.
Prefuse is an information visualisation toolkit that you can download to produce rich interactive data modeling, visualization, and interaction. Again you should check the Prefuse Gallery to see what is possible.
Google Visualisation API deserves a mention and nor just because it is Google. There is a vast range of sources, visualisation applications and, as expected, great integration with products like Google Docs. The openness of the platform allows for the mix and match of other developer's visualisations. A good starting point if you are looking to get your hands dirty.
C: Examples of highly developed and inspiring work
Shan Carter's work at the New York Times is a portfolio to die for. Everything from interactive data to beautifully crafted maps. Inspiring.
Ben Fry is the author of Visualizing Data published by O'Reilly and the creator of some visually brilliant work. Check out his All Streets project, an image of 26 million individual road segments.
Figure 2 - Ben Fry
Karl Hartig's charts, diagrams and information graphics.
Newsweek's Threat Meter and Doodlebuzz (both powered by Daylife). Threat Meter, utilising data from Daylife the intelligent content services platform, is a brilliant interactive tool that allows you to assess and rate the ‘heat' of a list of issues. The data is constantly updating which positions the tool as a brilliant gauge of issues. Doodlebuzz, again using data from Daylife, was created by Brendan Dawes as a method of visualising current news stories as typographic maps. When you open the program you choose a key word or phrase in the news and then ‘draw' the results. Try it now and you won't be disappointed.
Information Architect's Web Trend's map deserves a special mention for its sheer breadth and innovation. A new one is planned this year. Suggestion: start everyday with this as your map to the web.
D: Definite online resources
Infographics News
Flowing Data
Junk Charts
Information Aesthetics
There are even web traffic visualisation tools for the web analytics types among us. Here are some examples:
Click Density - records the position of every click on a page, creating a virtual heat map of visitor activity
Click Tale - produces scrolling heatmaps of visitor journeys
Click Heat - produces a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page.
Obviously, the recommendations and examples mentioned above are just a personal selection. For a more thorough and constantly updated list, please visit iapresentation.com.
There are, of course, still great practitioners of the pencil drawing to communicate complex information (even though long gone are the days that this was your only toolbox). Some wonderful examples can be found on Javier Zarracina's site. Thanks must go to Max Gadney.
By Matthew Solle
Matthew is a web producer, with focus on information architecture
and user experience, working in the City of London. For a long time he
has understood how technological advances can extend the possibilities
of data visualisation and the richness this can bring to the online
experience. He has worked in fine art, design, video and TV. He blogs
at iapresentation.com.
His online breadcrumb is: Twitter; Linkedin, Friendfeed, Flickr, last.fm, tumblr, wordpress, delicious, mybloglog, dopplr, Google Reader, dipity and slideshare.
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