visual thinking - maps and clouds

Given the overheads of putting all the images in one post, I am creating sub posts.
This one is maps and clouds

What is emerging is a continuum of visualisations from static through to dynamic, and from models through to metaphors ( sounds like a target for a magic quadrant visualization ;-)

the map below is a visualisation which incorporates real information - the colours and interconnections both explain relationships which exist with the data.

Its a map which is quite often come across - a visualisation of the Links of Data (LOD) as a cloud. The image owes its source to Christian Bizer from Berlin. The date on this diagram is July 2009. May be worth visiting the original source to check out any updates.




Also here is a further visualisation of web trends, another hybrid visualisation which is towards the model end of the spectrum.

Visual Thinking continued - graphic facilitation and recording

I come across the idea of graphic facilitation or graphic recording following up the work on Learning Maps which appears on the periodic table of visualisations.


















The learning map featured on the periodic table is Pepsi's The Revolution on Beverage Street (left) - which was developed to represent the supply chain activities for that company.

It seemed to me that representing the dynamics of emerging discussions, conclusions and thinking might sometimes be more usefully represented visually rather than in the usual textual report and proceedings format - or at least the two methods might complement each other.

I am a keen proponent of mindmaps for my own use, and can use them to record information, but I am really not much of an artist, and so looking at the work of specialist graphic designers and artists in this respect in interesting. Hope to have some (almost) first hand experience of graphic recording very soon, meanwhile why not take a look at some of the links?

Other intersting folk in the area include - Thinking Visually http://www.thinkingvisually.com/graphic.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkingvisually

They are sort of related to the analytical work you find from Davis McCandless http://www.davidmccandless.com/ who writes for the Guardian Datablog.

Information is Beautiful


David hosts the Information is Beautiful website which arose from the book of the same name http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )

He works with ( and praises) Steanie Posavec (who is with Norcot) http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie-posave.php .

Her work with Jack Kerouacs on the Road - analysis and visualisations is something to behold, and might even be of interest to hypertext buffs.

Companies who do graphical recording/facilitation













Graphic Change is a UK company who do graphic facilitation. You can use graphic facilitators to come along to your meeting and act as visual scribes.I am full of admiration for the skill they must apply. Its interesting to consider how they evolve/emerge their images.

I assume that graphic facilitators have a particularly rich visual vocabulary which combined with an understanding of the language of pictures enables them to construct visuals in this way

Visual Thinking Revisited

This is an update on my previous blog on visual literacy. For me, I think that high quality communication is key in every aspect of life, personal and professional, this post includes some thoughts, some references and some examples.

Why? 1) I'm interested in learning, and technology and change; 2) I'm active in teaching and researching learning technology and change

that means that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about what is happening, and trying to make sense of the evidence I find,

I have a set of visualisation tools I regularly use and thought it would be good to learn their proper names and actually categorise them

I was prompted to do this by a variety of experiences, but primarily one excellent resource (the periodic table of visualisation methods) and numerous bad experiences of me, my colleagues and students presenting information in unintelligible ways

Making Sense - Visualisation as a tool for thinking

cut a bit of slack here, using the wrong tool is sometimes ok, because its about a work in progress, making sense of your information and trying to find ways of understanding and communicating what you have found. After all playing with different sorts of visualisations will give you personal experience on which you can refine your understanding.

Communicating Understanding - Visualisation as a tool for talking

when we want to enter into a discourse about our understanding, then finding the best way to present information to afford that discourse is quite useful

while I am doing that, I would like to quote Tufte's observation "Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space"

So....

Data Visualisation

Expressing ideas in terms of visualisation can be a powerful tool for deepening your own understanding, and also for communicating new ideas.

Visualisations can range from the strictly factual (e.g. a graph derived from a set of data) through to ideographic (explaining the perceived inter-relationship between sets of ideas and concepts)

In some ways a table which summarises analysis of artefacts (a set of reviewed software or a set of reviewed papers) can be seen as a type of visualisation.

Visualisations can help save words in written reports, and can also be used to help structure an argument in a paper or a visual presentation. Most importantly they can contribute effectively to the communication of ideas, stimulating debate and disseminating understanding.

References

A few references for visualisations are listed below:

• Tufte, E. R. (1983) The visual display of quantitative information, Cambridge, MA, Graphical Press LLC. You can find out more about Tutfe's work via his web site http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
• Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA. Paper which describes this work
• http://www.visual-literacy.org is the website which is associated with Lenger and Eppler's work. You can find the Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation, which is an interactive web page with illustrative popup of each of the visualisation methods identified, at
  http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Tools List

Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation categorises visualisations into six broad types.

• Data
• Information
• Concept
• Strategy
• Metaphor
• Compound

This post looks at visualisation methods which I have found useful and relevant to my academic activities, either for research or for marshalling arguments and explanations either for teaching or explaining my understandings to friends and colleagues. It is interesting to consider this collection of methods against the repertoire of methods which are routinely used in particular disciplines (e.g. Computer Science and Management) In some cases, where such methods have been specifically designed to communicate a formal development process, or to document and subsequently manage a development process there is a stronger degree of literality and rigour, than might be found in some of the conceptual methods/thinking tools such as mind maps.

• One interesting role which has emerged out of the field of graphic visualisations is that of the graphic facilitator.
• Methods such as graphics cafes are also interesting.

Data Visualisation

These visualisations provide a direct mapping between the information which is presented, and the data which was collected and analysed.

Basic visualisations which most students  produce include tables, graphs, histograms, pie charts, and magic quadrants.  They are probably the most common visualisations which you will find in published papers. Often we are as more constrained by our medium of presentation (eg double column journal pages) that we are by the objective of clear communication.

Tables, Pie Charts and stuff

This is data representation, there is a one to one relationship between the data and the representation. With tables we can choose information, and communicate our undertanding by the location of information, we may also gain by putting a lot of data in one place, which people can use as a signpost, when they then follow an explanation through the text.

Concept Visualisations

I am particularly interested in concept visualisations because I am intersted in the communication of ideas - when we speculate and theories we are dealing in the conceptual. Some visualisation methods are more rigorous than others being associated with specific research practices' accepted analytical methods.  Others function as thinking tools, which represent incomplete (or not yet complete) representations of understandings.  

Concept Map

This is a formal modelling tool commonly used for knowledge representation and ontology creation.

Mind Map

This MindMap from Flickr courtesy of Mike Ellis from http://electronicmuseum.org.uk . The mindmap approach was designed originally and championed by Tony Buzan. Mind mapping is a thinking tool which can also be used for formally to record information spaces and to manage workflows. Its worth looking at the Buzan web site as a follow up, mindmaps may be drawn by hand or using software, and there are many tools available which can be used to create mind maps on computers. The diagram linked from in the Radar Diagram (below) provides an interactive snapshop of mapping software 

you probably already know about the following, but do some web searching if you are in doubt!

• Venn Diagram
• Cluster Diagram
• Layer Chart
• Concentric Circles

Radar

from http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/maps/mapping_tools_radar/radar.html

Compound Visualisations:
According to the visualisation periodic table, there are six types of compound visualisations - although I think that if you go to Tufte he identifies quite a few which have been generated with firm mappings to their data source.
 

Knowledge Map
These are basically hypothetical maps (often in the style of maps created by early mariners) which seek to demonstrate the 'landscape'. They also remind me in style of maps which accompany books like The Lord of the Rings and Swallows and Amazons.

You probably need a great deal of imagination to create a convincing knowledge map, but they can be highly persuasive and powerful in communicating an overview of content and issues in a particular area.

I find label knowledge maps a little misleading, and wonder if mythical maps, or metaphor maps might be more accurate. To me the term knowledge implies a degree of certainty and finality which I do not think is actually communicated in the final product.

I have come across a couple of knowledge maps which are probably of interest to folks in my research area.

Knowledge Map

Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/256/
Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities_small.png

eLearnland

Learning Map


early work in this area was done by companies seeking to explain the intricacies of their organisaiton. Probably the most famous is the work done by Pepsi on Beverage Street. There is a paper which explores this work The Learning Map Approach by James Haudan and Christy Contardi Stone, a white paper published in The Change Handbook, Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Stevan Caddy. Here the approach is one of metaphor rather than formal modelling, although it may be possible to incorporate meaning via metaphor, such as sense of proximity and distance, known and unknown.

from http://elearningargentina.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/informal-learning.jpg

Underground Map

This is called a metro map by the folks at visual-lliteracy.org, but since the original map (a visualisation which depicts conections and interconnections, but priviledges this over scale accuracy) was designed for the London Underground, I think it is more accurate and respectful to call it an Underground Map - the paris metro map is a totally different beast!

This example visualisation of Web Trends was produced in 2007 by Otto Nassar (version 2)

According to the web site at http://informationarchitects.jp/wtm4/

"The map has been featured all across the web from .... The Web Trend Map plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully selected through dialogue with map enthusiasts, and every domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, and character. "

Version 4 - a rather different beast is shown below

Other Stuff

Information is Beautiful

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/

rather fabulous site to browse to gather ideas and models of information graphics

Colorschemer

if you are going to present visual information, you will need to choose decent colour schemes! take a look at http://www.colorschemer.com/blog/

The Visual Thesaurus http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

visualising words and their semantic interconnections

tag cloud

just as you see on the left of this post, it offers both a mapping and a compact visual analysis of the information

Wordle http://www.wordle.net/

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends".

Gallery of Data Visualization - the best and worst of statistical graphics

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/intro.html

Gapminder is an online visualisation tool. It works with a collection of provided data sets, useful for getting an idea of what visualisations might look like.

http://www.gapminder.org

visualcomplexity.com is a website which provides an index into many different visualisation methods and tools

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

The last time I looked, the main categories of visualisation were

Art (62)

 Biology (50)

 Business Networks (25)

 Computer Systems (29)

 Food Webs (7)

 Internet (30)

 Knowledge Networks (105)

 Multi-Domain Representation (60)

 Music (33)

 Others (59)

 Pattern Recognition (24)

 Political Networks (20)

 Semantic Networks (30)

 Social Networks (89)

 Transportation Networks (45)

 World Wide Web (55)

Further reading 

 Concept Mapping with thanks to the online concept mapping resource guide http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/mapping/mapping.htm

-->

Trochim, W. (1989). An introduction to concept mapping for planning and evaluation.  In W. Trochim (Ed.) A Special Issue of Evaluation and Program Planning, 12, 1-16.

Trochim, W. (1989). Concept mapping: Soft science or hard art?  In W. Trochim (Ed.) A Special Issue of Evaluation and Program Planning, 12, 87-110.

Trochim, W. Reliability of Concept Mapping. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Evaluation Association, Dallas, Texas, November, 1993. 

Tukey, John W (1977). Exploratory Data Analysis. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-07616-0. OCLC 3058187.

campaigning for visual literacy

For me, I think that high quality communication is key in every aspect of life, personal and professional, this post includes some thoughts, some references and some examples.

Why? 1) I'm interested in learning, and technology and change; 2) I'm active in teaching and researching learning technology and change

that means that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about what is happening, and trying to make sense of the evidence I find,
I have a set of visualisation tools I regularly use and thought it would be good to learn their proper names and actually categorise them

I was prompted to do this by a variety of experiences, but primarily one excellent resource (the periodic table of visualisation methods) and numerous bad experiences of me, my colleagues and students presenting information in unintelligible ways

Making Sense - Visualisation as a tool for thinking

cut a bit of slack here, using the wrong tool is sometimes ok, because its about a work in progress, making sense of your information and trying to find ways of understanding and communicating what you have found. After all playing with different sorts of visualisations will give you personal experience on which you can refine your understanding.

Communicating Understanding - Visualisation as a tool for talking

when we want to enter into a discourse about our understanding, then finding the best way to present information to afford that discourse is quite useful

while I am doing that, I would like to quote Tufte's observation "Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space"

So....

Data Visualisation

Expressing ideas in terms of visualisation can be a powerful tool for deepening your own understanding, and also for communicating new ideas.
Visualisations can range from the strictly factual (e.g. a graph derived from a set of data) through to ideographic (explaining the perceived inter-relationship between sets of ideas and concepts)
In some ways a table which summarises analysis of artefacts (a set of reviewed software or a set of reviewed papers) can be seen as a type of visualisation.

Visualisations can help save words in written reports, and can also be used to help structure an argument in a paper or a visual presentation. Most importantly they can contribute effectively to the communication of ideas, stimulating debate and disseminating understanding.

References

A couple of references for visualisations are listed below:

Tufte, E. R. (1983) The visual display of quantitative information, Cambridge, MA, Graphical Press LLC. You can find out more about Tutfe's work via his web site http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA. Paper which describes this work


http://visual-literacy.org is the website which is associated with Lenger and Eppler's work. You can find the Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation, which is an interactive web page with illustrative popup of each of the visualisation methods identified, at. http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html download . The site include a link to the original paper and a range of associated materials.

Note: Editing this post will be intermittent, but as I work on this I am collecting and noting examples via delicious and you can see links to papers and examples by looking at my public delicious tags.

Finally there is a work in progress of tools (image examples and discussions to be added)

Tools List

Periodic Table of Methods of Visualisation categorises visualisations into six broad types.

Data

Information

Concept

Strategy

Metaphor

Compoud

This page looks at visualisation methods which I have found useful and relevant to my academic activities, either for research or for marshalling arguments and explanations either for teaching or explaining my understandings to friends and colleagues. It is interesting to consider this collection of methods against the repertoire of methods which are routinely used in particular disciplines (e.g. Computer Science and Management) In some cases, where such methods have been specifically designed to communicate a formal development process, or to document and subsequently manage a development process there is a stronger degree of literality and rigour, than might be found in some of the conceptual methods/thinking tools such as mind maps.

one interesting role which has emerged out of the field of graphic visualisations is that of the graphic facilitator.

Methods such as graphics cafes are also interesting.

Data Visualisation

These visualisations provide a direct mapping between the information which is presented, and the data which was collected an analysed

Tables

Pie Charts

Magic Quadrant

Concept Visualisation

Concept Map

this is a formal modeling tool commonly used for knowledge rep0resentation and ontology creation.

Mind Map

Designed originally and championed by Tony Buzan, mind mapping is a thinking tool which can also be used for formally to record information spaces and to manage workflows. Its worth looking at the Buzan web site as a follow up, mindmaps may be drawn by hand or using software, and there are many tools available which can be used to create mind maps on computers. The diagram linked from in the Radar Diagram provides an interactive snapshop of mapping software.

Venn Diagram

Cluster Diagram

Layer Chart

Concentric Circles

Radar

from http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/maps/mapping_tools_radar/radar.html

Compound Visualisations:
According to the visualisation periodic table, there are six types of compound visualisations - although I think that if you go to Tufte he identifies quite a few which have been generated with firm mappings to their data source.
Knowledge Map

These are basically hypothetical maps (often in the style of maps created by early mariners) which seek to demonstrate the 'landscape'. They also remind me in style of maps which accompany books like The Lord of the Rings and Swallows and Amazons.

You probably need a great deal of imagination to create a convincing knowledge map, but they can be highly persuasive and powerful in communicating an overview of content and issues in a particular area.

I find label knowledge maps a little misleading, and wonder if mythical maps, or metaphor maps might be more accurate. To me the term knowledge implies a degree of certainty and finality which I do not think is actually communicated in the final product.

I have come across a couple of knowledge maps which are probably of interest to folks in my research area.

Knowledge Map

Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/256/
Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities_small.png

eLearnland

Learning Map


early work in this area was done by companies seeking to explain the intricacies of their organisaiton. Probably the most famous is the work done by Pepsi on Beverage Street. There is a paper which explores this work The Learning Map Approach by James Haudan and Christy Contardi Stone, a white paper published in The Change Handbook, Peggy Holman, Tom Devane and Stevan Caddy

from http://elearningargentina.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/informal-learning.jpg

Spray Diagram

Stakeholder Rating Map

Portfolio Diagram

Strategy Map

Life Cycle Diagram

S Cycle

Hype Cycle

Stakeholder Map

Fishbone Diagram

Tree

Timeline

Temple Diagram

Cycle Diagram

Funnel Diagram

Scatter Plot

Pie Chart

Bar Chart

Histogram

Continuum

Cartesian Co-ordinates

Other Stuff

visualcomplexity.com is a website which provides an index into many different visualisation methods and tools

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

The last time I looked, the main categories of visualisation were

Art (62)

Biology (50)

Business Networks (25)

Computer Systems (29)

Food Webs (7)

Internet (30)

Knowledge Networks (105)

Multi-Domain Representation (60)

Music (33)

Others (59)

Pattern Recognition (24)

Political Networks (20)

Semantic Networks (30)

Social Networks (89)

Transportation Networks (45)

World Wide Web (55)

The Visual Thesaurus http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

visualising words and their semantic interconnections


Wordle http://www.wordle.net/

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends".

tag cloud
tag crowd

http://www.tagcrowd.com/

"TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

It was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University.

Today, text clouds are primarily used for navigation and visualization on Web 2.0 sites that employ user-generated metadata (tags) as a categorization scheme. (Flickr is a good example.)
TagCrowd is doing something different.

When we look at a text cloud, we see not only an informative, beautiful image that communicates much in a single glance, we see a whole new perspective on text.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

* as topic summaries for speeches and written works
* as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO)
* for visual analysis of survey data
* as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
* for data mining a text corpus
* for helping writers and students reflect on their work
* as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
* as resumes in a single glance
* as visual poetry"

Gallery of Data Visualization - the best and worst of statistical graphics
http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/intro.html

Gapminder is an online visualisation tool
http://www.gapminder.org

refs
to complete

Concept Mapping - Trochim 1989 ( trochim's six steps)
data analysisTukey 1977