Visualizations

The Project

Math/CS 484 -- The goal of our Ford/Knight project is to distill and organize the principles of visualizing large data sets. Modern science is often done by small groups of people that come from diverse backgrounds, e.g. a mathematician, a biologist, and a computer scientist. We plan to solicit input in the form of example data sets to work with from each of the natural and social science departments on campus. This work will provide a foundation for a course, or course module, which we hope to offer in the future. Must see instructor for registration.

Examples

• Eurozone debt - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15748696
• Wikileaks US embassy cables - http://datavisualization.ch/datasets/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables/
• Stopping SOPA and PIPA - http://visual.ly/stop-sopa
• Auto accident statistics in Britain - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16631597
• A snapshot of the rapidly changing world of computing, communications and technology - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/06/science/1206-world.html?ref=science
• Words by the millions - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/business/words-by-the-millions-sorted-by-software.html?_r=1&ref=technology
• county health ratings - http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app
• live wind map - http://hint.fm/wind/index.html
• Factual - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/business/factuals-gil-elbaz-wants-to-gather-the-data-universe.html?ref=technology
• worldwide health data - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=player_embedded
• Obama's budget proposal - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html?emc=eta1

Press

NPR did a couple of interesting segments on Big Data, visualizations, and the search of mathematicians and others who can do that stuff. (December, 2011)

• Part 1 - http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142521910/the-digital-breadcrumbs-that-lead-to-big-data?ps=rs
• Part 2 - http://www.npr.org/2011/11/30/142893065/the-search-for-analysts-to-make-sense-of-big-data

New York Times article from December, 2011 on bioinformatics and visualization, MicJ

Other

• http://www.r-bloggers.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-r-for-data-visualization/
• At some point nyt.com supported a "viz lab" where people could use their data sets to build their own visualizations. I can't find a current reference to this now. 20 January 2012
• IBM's Many Eyes -
• http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~stasko/7450/syllabus.html

Presentations

• David McCandless: The beauty of data visualizations (TED) - http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html
  • Military spending - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/01/information-is-beautiful-military-spending
• What we learned from 5 million books (TED) - http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
  • Google's ngram interface: http://books.google.com/ngrams/

Keywords

• infographics
• Big data
• work flow(s)

The People

1. Dakota Lambert
2. Tristan Wright
3. Elena Sergienko
4. Diana Ainembabazi
5. Mikel Qafa
6. Ivan Babic
7. Leif DeJong

Tools

• GPlates - plate tectonics visualizations, multi-platform (http://www.gplates.org/)

The Plan

1) Planning items

• Are there any field trip opportunities?
• Figure-out what books to order
• Figure-out what are the likely conference opportunities?
• Are there any other tools besides R that we should be considering?
  • GRASS?

2) Things to learn

• Is there a somewhat canonical process or technique that one can reliably apply to go from readings -> data -> information -> visualization?
• How to utilize geocoding attributes?
• How to utilize timestamp attributes?

3) Things to read

4) Things to do during the class

5) Questions

• Which parts of statistics do people need to know?
  • correlation for PCA
• What linear algebra do people need to know?
  • matrix operations for PCA

6) Tools

• R under Linux/OSX

7) Possible sources for data sets

• John Iverson
  • turtle birthing data
  • phylogenetic reconstruction
• Mike Deibel
• Kathy Milar
• Meg Streepy
  • GPlates - visualizing plate tectonics