Well, not entirely limited to libraries.  Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though.  These are all freely available.

Read More

 This is a quick look at the state-of-the-art of network visualization in systems biology. It’s an interesting topic on its own (and my day job at the moment), and also as it relates to the visualization of other types of networks, such as social networks (think Facebook). Systems biology is all about looking at proteins, pathogens, and more, within the contexts in which they interact. Naturally, then, the visualizations that tend to be particularly useful are those such as network visualizations that can provide macro understanding of the interactions.  Questions such visualizations help with include those of the form “if a drug affects protein X, what else will it affect?”

Read More

FINVIZ is a suite of free financial tools that takes advantage of modern visualization ideas.  The infoviz and interaction designs are certainly worth a blog post.  Here’s a look at their efforts…

Read More

Why does it seem I have to look hard to find good data visualization examples?  Why do few tech companies devote resources to visualization (Google’s the obvious exception)?  Why are there relatively few job postings for visualization, with many of those there are requiring mainly graphic design skills and not data visualization skills?  I was thinking about this today and I came up with a few possible reasons, some based on perceptions, and others based on marketplace realities.

Reason #1: People Don’t Know What Data Visualization Is

People don’t know what data visualization is.  Don’t believe me?  Read the Amazon.com reviews for the book Data Visualization by Ben Fry. They contain negative comments such as “One would expect a book with the title ‘Visualizing Data’ to be crammed with pictures”.  The issue seems be that too much of the book is devoted to data and the mapping of data properties to visual properties. 

Read More

NYTimes.com has done a great job of moving beyond the static infographics found in newspapers.  10 favorites below…comment if you know of good ones I’ve missed.  Also, for further reading/viewing, see…

- Playgrounds for Data: Inspiration from NYTimes.com Interactives
- Infovis 2007 slides on Matthew Ericson’s blog…

Read More

Just wanted to put up my slides from ETech this past week.  The talk is pretty similar to the talk I posted a few months ago, just a bit more fleshed out.
[ppt][pptx][pdf]

Read More

An information visualization conference, the See Conference, is being held in Wiesbaden, Germany, on April 19th.  Impressive speaker list.  The conference organizers plan to stream the speeches in real time via the conference website.

Ben Fry	Zachary Lieberman
Frank van Ham	And comfortable seats!