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Here is a sneak peek at a detailed post of mine slated to appear next week published in Information Space.
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Unless you have been hiding under a rock or camped out in a Bhutanese monastery, I am sure you have noticed that information graphics and data visualizations are everywhere. There are sites dedicated to it, volumes of books detailing the process of it, and visualization tools for just about everything, everywhere you look. Social media. Your website. Your money. Whatever.
There are a ton of tools out there, but what does it take to pull off a successful visualization? Quite a few things, actually, but first, a quick overview of the differences between information graphics and data visualizations. Wait, they are not the same thing?
Not really.
An information graphic generally deals with answering and analyzing knowledge, whereas data visualization is typically a more complex examination of a set of statistics. Information graphics are, more often than not, created ‘by hand’ by an individual or a design team (using programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop). Data visualizations are typically created in an automatic fashion using software to generate the image (SAS or Tableau). An extreme example to contrast the two would be visualizing Girl Scout cookie sales with cookies (infographic) paired against business analytics (data visualization). Continued…
Posted in Art, Design, Information, Technology.
– September 10, 2011
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In what could well be considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have no emails in ANY of my inboxes. I am presently using Microsoft Outlook for mail and, like others, I have several accounts I check. To make things easier, I forward my Gmail and yahoo emails to my kitlas.com account and keep that separate from my syr.edu account. Feeling liberated!
If you were wondering, the great R. David Lankes, author of The Atlas of New Librarianship (published by MIT Press), had the first to enter my newly scrubbed inbox with his check-in on foursquare at Sam’s Barbershop.
Posted in Design, Technology.
– September 3, 2011
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After much deliberation, I updated my WordPress theme. I am using the Carrington CMS theme platform for WordPress. The Carrington Framework was developed by CrowdFavorite.
Posted in Art, Design, Kitlas.
– August 27, 2011
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Aside from my internship at the Smithsonian Institution, I had one goal this summer: dig deeper into understanding, analyzing and representing information.
I set out to learn more about theory, analysis, and implementation through a fairly methodical method. As a Master’s student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, I have already had a huge head start and knew where to look and what to look for. There are also the blogs and twitter accounts I follow. Combining everything, I was able to come up with common trends and themes and vet them against what everybody was saying and writing.
What turned out was a list that will take you from the big picture, atmospheric view all the way down to pixel level decisions and everything in between.
I am in varying stages of completion (there is another list I am working through as well) with the listed books and will keep hammering at them throughout the upcoming semester. BTW, a number of these books can be purchased through O’Reilly Media, which regularly has some pretty sweet sales (buy 2 get one free, discounts for digital books, etc.).
I was first made aware of Edward R. Tufte‘s work in Jaime Snyder‘s course on Information Design. The guy is essentially the godfather/granddaddy of information design and visualization, analytic design, and associated creative processes. Definitely worth getting the hardcover editions of both. They are full color and gorgeous.
Posted in Art, Design, Information, Syracuse University, Technology.
– August 24, 2011
