Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 81

The map could be useful to meteorologists who study wind patterns or to
educators who teach weather concepts, but Viégas and Wattenberg consider
it an art project. To see the environment as a living, breathing thing is certainly
something beautiful to see.

FIGURE 2-30 (following page)
Wind Map (2012) by Fernanda
Viégas and Martin Wattenberg,
http://hint.fm/wind/

I Want You To Want Me , by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, shown in
Figure 2-31, is an installation that was commissioned by New York's Museum
of Modern Art. Like DuBois' map (shown in Chapter 1, “Understanding Data”),
Harris and Kamvar's piece uses data collected from online dating sites, which
captures how people identify themselves and who they want to be with. I
Want You To Want Me parses profiles and extracts sentences that start with “I
am” or “I am looking for” and represents each sentence with a balloon float-
ing in an interactive sky. Each balloon carries the silhouette of an animated
person, almost as if each represents an individual's floating hope to find an
ideal partner. (The piece, by the way, was installed on Valentine's Day.)

Although there are statistical breakdowns for aspects like top first dates,
desires, and turn-ons, I Want You To Want Me , installed on a large, high-reso-
lution touchscreen, is like a story that lets you peek in and explore people's
search for relationships. You can easily immerse yourself in the data, which
is both personal and easy to relate to. It's harder to do that with a traditional
graph. That said, the key to high-quality data art, like any visualization, is still
to let the data guide design.

THE EVERYDAY

Visualization has also found its way into the everyday, especially because almost
all online content is stored in a database. And as people grow more comfort-
able with interacting on their computers, developers can create interfaces
that display more data at once. From the side of those who build applications,
this is great because the growing amounts of data require new views that the
old ones can't accommodate, and from the consumer side, the experience
improves as the data is easier to digest.

In 2004, Marcos Weskamp created newsmap , which is a treemap view into
Google News, as shown in Figure 2-32. If you go straight to Google News,
you get a standard list of headlines, complemented with a thumbnail. Some
of the top stories are listed at the top, and recent ones in the right sidebar.