Telling Stories with Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 5

The interactive piece scrapes sentences and phrases from personal
public blogs and then visualizes them as a box of floating bubbles. each
bubble represents an emotion and is color-coded accordingly. As a whole,
it is like individuals floating through space, but watch a little longer and
you see bubbles start to cluster. Apply sorts and categorization through
the interface to see how these seemingly random vignettes connect. Click
an individual bubble to see a single story. It's poetic and revealing at the
same time.

 Interact and
explore people's
emotions in
Jonathan Harris
and Sep Kamvar's
live and online
piece at http://
wefeelfine.org .

There are lots of other examples such as Golan Levin's The Dumpster ,
which explores blog entries that mention breaking up with a significant
other; Kim Asendorf's Sumedicina , which tells a fictional story of a man
running from a corrupt organization, with not words, but graphs and
charts; or Andreas Nicolas Fischer's physical sculptures that show eco-
nomic downturn in the United States.

The main point is that data and visualization don't always have to be just
about the cold, hard facts. Sometimes you're not looking for analytical
insight. Rather, sometimes you can tell the story from an emotional point
of view that encourages viewers to reflect on the data. Think of it like this.
Not all movies have to be documentaries, and not all visualization has to
be traditional charts and graphs.

 See Flowing-
Data for many
more examples
of art and data at
http://datafl.ws/
art .

Entertainment

Somewhere in between journalism and art, visualization has also found
its way into entertainment. If you think of data in the more abstract sense,
outside of spreadsheets and comma-delimited text files, where photos
and status updates also qualify, this is easy to see.

Facebook used status updates to gauge the happiest day of the year, and
online dating site OkCupid used online information to estimate the lies
people tell to make their digital selves look better, as shown in Figure 1-3.
These analyses had little to do with improving a business, increasing rev-
enues, or finding glitches in a system. They circulated the web like wildfire
because of their entertainment value. The data revealed a little bit about
ourselves and society.

Facebook found the happiest day to be Thanksgiving, and OkCupid found
that people tend to exaggerate their height by about 2 inches.