Data visualization

Ever since I saw a guy named Jeff Heer come to UW and talk about some of the challenges of data visualization, I've kept my eye out for good examples. The problem being, not every piece of data can be thrown up in some kind of bar graph or pie chart and be instantly clear. The guy who came was one of the people who created the name visualizer. This is a fun thing that made the rounds on the net a while ago where you can compare how common different names are over different years. A fun example: type in Adolph and see the popularity magically declines in the '30s. Hm. Or note how girls names beginning in vowels saw a huge dip in popularity but a recent resurgence. Point being, what are new ways to look at old data to "tease out the meaning"?

This is what I was thinking about when I saw a recent visualization in the New York Times showing movies and their grosses. Its not quite as interactive as the first link, but you can scroll across 20 years. Here, you can see the evolution of the summer and Christmas box-office bulge. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer movies seem to make up significant portions of the bulges. Its an interesting way to see the data, and if more raw data were interactive and displayed intuitively, it would be a way to rally the "information-overload" of our age into meaningful info.