Data visualization is the newest thing that exists today in Information Design and through it you can synthesize a large group of information, resulting in an interactive interface, complex, yet aesthetic and informational.

The above example is the interactive application My Map, created with Processing (Java) by Christopher Baker to display the history of his discussions via email.

What is it

We’re used for decades with infographics in newspapers, but the data visualization is still a very new area. Despite having existed one or other sporadic example before, it was around the year 2000 that visualization began to popularize, but it didn’t earn yet the recognition appropriate out of internet. With it you can go beyond charts, since there are more possibilities to interact and navigate in a more organic way for each data.

While a chart is able to visually summarize the information so we can compare it, visualization is able to go further and reveal interpretations that wouldn’t be possible due to the complexity of the information from the original data.

A bit of theory

Each item presented into a visualization is called a node, which can be clustered into groups and you can still show associations between items, demarcating relationships between them. Each node can be bound to an entity with certain information profile (related to the content) and visually represented in a unique way (related to appearance). The mapping of entities is correlated to the area of Knowledge Management and the visual presentation to the Information Design.

When we have a huge group of varied data, the visualization allows the user to instantly see the whole presentation, gaining an overall view to further identify the type of entity sought (by the representation of a standard visual icon) and then navigate between the nodes (each of the items listed) and check the relevance of relationships between those nodes.

The interactivity

What makes the visualization an advance is the ability to be interactive: we are able to navigate through its data organically, spending just a little time reading textual information to find visually (with variations in size, shape and color) and quickly the information that we seek. Thus, we reduce a lot the search process for an item in a universe of thousands of them.

The argentine site lanacion.com.ar displays its related news using an interactive visualization. To see it, just visit the page of any news and find the button "Ver Gráfico".

As additional resources, this type of data presentation can interact with the laws of physics (such as acceleration and weight), giving an analogy to the natural world, for example, giving more weight to nodes that are closest to the word searched and increasing the acceleration of lighters nodes that are more distant. Another possibility is to use a Thesaurus, which is simply a kind of dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, to show the relationship closer or more distant of the displayed nodes in the visualization, according to the words involved and its relationship.

Sites of reference

Visual Complexity is a site that lists the major news in the area, with projects made with different programming languages. Information Aesthetics is focused on projects with the differential of always presenting good videos. Flowing Data is a blog that not only post references but also has articles about data visualization.

Read also Tools to display complex data, a more technical article where I describe the existing tools to produce interactive visualizations in ActionScript (Flash / Flex), Java and JavaScript.