WebHelperMagazine.com

There’s a reason that great leaders are called “visionaries.” There’s a reason that the power of the imagination fueling the arts, architecture, science fiction, and engineering, leads and then manifests what it sees — in reality. I remember when there were those arguing that websites and web pages were best left without graphics. Of course, that was when data transfer was much slower, but again the imagination fired the fingers of software engineers who brought us the technology to do what we needed through compression schemes. Now, Max Keisler is going to take us on a tour of Visualizations online today. When you can grasp data visually — how will that help us create the next generation of social media, help solve science problems, and fuel Web 3.0? Let’s take a look. [Ed.]

by Max Keisler

Most interaction designers understand the concept of timelines and other time-based data. Blogs, calendars, and to-do lists are all examples of time-based data. However, if you are trying to fit 400 data points into a 1024 x 726 screen you’ll quickly see how challenging time-base data can be. Currently, many interaction designers are turning to visualizations to overcome many of the issues associated with this form of data representation. Below you’ll find a list of some of the best time-based visualizations on the web.

Also, if you want to see or learn more about data visualizations please visit DesignDemo and VizLIst. I post visualizations on a daily basis in both of these sections.

Please use the comments section of this post to let the community know of any useful resources I’ve left out. Most of the descriptions below are taken from the developers of the example. Thanks, Max.

“You can think of circaVie as a souped-up, unique way of blogging, where you can seamlessly share photos, video and text that other users can comment upon. Your timelines are also portable…”

The Sputnik Legacy

“The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked of the space race. Since then mankind has sent more than 150 missions to explore outer space. The Newsweek captures all 150 world wide space flights in an easy to use timeline format. The visualization is sortable by year, timespan, planet and country. When you roll over a timeline point you get additional information about the flight. Additionaly, if you click on the Inside Sputnik tab you get a visualization of Sputnik 1 and all of its parts. Very fun and easy to use.”

British History Timeline
“Explore all of British history, from the Neolithic to the present day, with this easy-to-use interactive timeline. Browse hundreds of key events and discover how the past has shaped the world we live in today. ‘Take a Journey’ when the timeline has loaded to follow themes such as Slavery, Women’s Rights and Technology.”

Timepiece – Visualize Film Ideas
“Timepiece is an experimental data visualization that help you explore Filmforay’s site content including, all of their film ideas, new members, comments and votes on each film idea. Presently there is five months worth to data explore, however, this will undoubtedly grow. As stated by LInden at Filmforay, “The visualization is done with Adobe Flash and pulls all recent data from the site, updated every 30 minutes. Currently it takes a pretty heavy toll on your CPU and loading does take some time, so older computers might have some trouble running it. And I’ll admit the design wouldn’t scale very well given a larger data set, but for the meager traffic filmforay has received so far it does just fine!” Time is one of the most challenging aspects to represent in data visualizations. Linden has created a very unique view of his site’s content over time.”

circaVie – Create and Share Timelines
“circaVie allows you to easily create multimedia timelines all about your life. Special events, noteworthy achievements, relationships, memorable vacations, interests and hobbies, celebrations, announcements… you name it. If it’s about life, it’s circaVie. By creating a circaVie timeline and adding events to it, you’re automatically able to share your life and interests with your friends, your family and the rest of the world in a brand new way. You can think of circaVie as a souped-up, unique way of blogging, where you can seamlessly share photos, video and text that other users can comment upon. Your timelines are also portable and can be shared anywhere you like since they’re all embeddable into your personal Web site, or online profile. Just create your timeline here and take it with you wherever you like!”

Recreating Movement
“Recreating Movement is a computer program for analysing film sequences and has been developed within a diploma thesis. With the help of various filters and settings Recreating Movement makes it possible to extract single frames of any given film sequence and arranges them behind each other in a three-dimensional space. This creates a tube-like set of frames that “freezes” a particular time span in a film. By using the keyboard the viewer can browse through the sequence of frames, chose any kind of view of the sequence of frames and influence the displayed frames directly via a displayable menu bar.”

Comment Timeline Visualization

“While gawking at some of the really cools toys by Moritz Stefaner , I got particularly interested in his post about visualizing time gaps in data and had a moment of inspiration. Instead of vertically gaping the data, you could “timeline” the data like we used to do in gradeschool.”

Slife
“Slife 1.3 offers a whole new way to keep track of what you do in your computer. Visualize your activities, improve your productivity and manage your time more efficiently. Slife observes everything you do in your computer and plots your activities in a graphical timeline. Its unique approach to activity tracking and time management opens up a world of possibilities.”

Timepedia Chronoscope
“Chronoscope is a visualization platform under development at Timepedia for time series datasets. Chronoscope stems from a desire for responsiveness and interactivity when navigating or authoring datasets. Ultimately we aim to bring something like the experience of Google Maps or Google Earth to time series data.”

Timeline of Trends & Events
“Timeline of Trends & Events (1750 to 2100) from futureswatch. Social change in America follows remarkably consistent patterns of behavior dating back to the time of the War of Independence. A close analysis of those patterns reveals why American society, at the beginning of the 21st century, is so bitterly divided. Those patterns also reveal the direction social and political values are likely to move over the next quarter century.”

SIMILE project
“SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.”

About the Author: Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites. This article is is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.