Information is beautiful

by | Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Anybody who knows me (and/or reads this blog) will know of my love of issues related to representation (see all postings under that category). So I am always looking out for new and interesting representations. An lovely example sent to me by Patrick Dickson is website titled Information is beautiful. This site, and much of the work showcased there is the creation of David McCandless, a free-lance information designer. He describes his interests as being in “how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath.”

For instance check out If Twitter was a community of 100 people
Twitter were 100 people

An example of how just visualizing and representing data can change one’s prior conception of a idea can be found at How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (sort of).

The one that made the best connection to me personally was Caffeine & Calories.

Enjoy.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

SITE08 Keynote YouTubed!

I just found out (via These Apples are Delicious blog, and more specifically this posting: Creative Teachers) that the keynote that Matt and I presented at SITE08 is now available on YouTube! Somebody went through the effort of breaking up the video into 5 parts and...

Capital City River Run, Half Marathon

This weekend I completed my sixth Capital City River Run. I participated in the half-marathon and completed it at a 10:10 pace, a total time of 2 hours 13 minutes (and 2 seconds, but who is counting). Interestingly this pace was actually better than my pace the last...

Sita sings the blues

I have been following Nina Paley's career for a while now. I first found out about her through the now defunct Desi website, badmash.com and have tracked her website off and on. Nina is an amazing animator and her best work is devoted to the Indian epic The Ramayana...

New triplet Ambigram (Now in 3D)!

A few weeks ago I had shared a few triplet-ambigrams I had designed. For the uninitiated a triplet ambigram is a 3-d shape that cast different, and interesting, shadows depending on where you shine light on it. For instance here's a triplet ambigram that casts three...

26 years ago… My first publication!

Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story titled "We all fall down," that was published the popular-science magazine Science Today. Science Today, edited by Mukul Sharma who wrote science fiction himself, was maybe the only outlet where you could...

EPET at SITE, 2014

SITE2014 (the annual conference of the Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education) is being held in Jacksonville, Florida starting the 17th of March. As always, the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at MSU has a significant presence...

Of clouds, lentils and deep geometries

Back in March of 2012 I was on a plane flying back from the SITE2012 conference in Austin, Texas and noticed an interesting cloud-formation through my airplane window. This intrigued me enough that I took a picture. Here it is (click on the image for a larger...

EPET @ SITE in New Orleans, the video

Sandra Sawaya has created a video from photographs taken during our recent sojourn to New Orleans for SITE2013. I think it captures a bit of what we did over there - lots of photos of food and friends, and some presentations. Enjoy.

Seeing differently (veja du with video)

I am always looking for examples of looking at the world differently - of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. This is of course connected with the veja du assignments I give my students. I just came across a couple of very interesting video examples...

1 Comment

  1. Bob Reuter

    There’s a very subtle omission in the visual representation… or I’m getting something wrong… Who or what are the grey people?

    Reply

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