Hi all,

Apologies in advance if this is not directly related to Processing, however this is probably one of the better places to come to speak with people involved in the field.

I am trying to think of some ideas for a data vizualization project. I was initially thinking of the US Election results with visualizations of various demographics, but I am finding the data sets hard to come by. I want to do something which falls into these catagories:

1) Potential for a high level of graphical stimulus
2) Easily obtainable data set
3) Achievable through the use of Processing, and/or other vizualization tools.

tim,

life is one big data set. artists have been filtering it, mining it, refining it etc for "visualizations" for hundreds of years.

get thee to a museum and check out all the cool art. no, dont go look online or in a book. see it with your own eyes the way it was intended to be seen - widescreen and in technicolor.


see whats been done with brillo boxes. see whats been done with "paint splatter". just trying to portray the "data-set" of a nude body has resulted in countless different "visualizations".

art is a 3-letter word for information design.

nude bodies are way more interesting than zip codes any day of the week - wouldnt you agree?

the "how" is what makes you an artist. nobody can you tell you how.

except maybe andy warhol...

you will have to walk that path alone, though. good luck.

-0.

The important thing is to find something that you're curious about, or actually want to see. Starting with the data is usually a dead end, because you'll probably wind up with something that looks like data. In the last infovis course I taught, we banned visualization of stock market data for this reason--most people don't actually *care* about it, but it seems like an easily available data set, so too many people try it.

Instead, think about a question that you want to answer visually. For instance, in the zipdecode piece, it was "how do postal codes relate to geography". This isn't particularly complicated or creative, but the visualization has to come from something that you're interested in. If you're bored by it, all you'll convey to others is that the data is boring.

There are known (existing) datasets and then there are unknown datasets.

I am particularly working on the second one (still very early stage). btw. just popping off this idea to get you thinking.

I am exploring to plot website linkages on physical map. I input one URL to my PHP script, then the script iterates through all the external links on that URL and goes to each of those pages. Iteratively, it scans each of those page and extract all external links from those websites and does this for about 3 to 5 levels (based on how many links you find).

Later, I run a script to extract IP addresses of these domains.

In the end, I run another PHP script to get latitude and longitudes of each IP address the plot the linkage tree on a map. (thats the ultimate goal to be achieved)

Not there yet but kind of halfway.

So my point was, in some way, you can also create your own datasets.

As Ben says, data visualization is all about what you want in the end. For me the goal was to see how my website is linked to other website in physical space. That got it all started.