Understanding connections
I have been thinking a lot about data visualization recently, driven predominantly by a project that I am working on with my friend Ken. We are working on a great project to help brands really understand what their users think of them, using some complex analysis techniques coupled with some bleeding-edge data visualization work.
As I have started to understand this field more I have come across some mindblowing work. What I have become really fascinated by is graphically representing inter-connections, particularly between people and data sets. I think this is where some of the really interesting design and interpretation work is happening right now, and I am thrilled to be working on creating some new work to add to the fold.
Two pieces of work to take a look at - above is the lovely tweetwheel project, which will show you how inter-connected all of your twitter followers are (be patient) - lovely to look at and really interesting to explore. Second is the wordle project, that has been around for a while. Enter any piece of text and it will perform a simple analysis on the text to show you inter-relationships between words and phrases. Super interesting for large, cumbersome and qualitative data sets.
Dataviz is going to be the next hot field in technology and I am excited to see it unfold.
If you know any great designers that want to help Ken and I build new dataviz techniques, point them towards this posting.
