A recent post on O’Reily media RIA’s blog portraitsĀ a useful collection of 28 data visualization software. It seems that different industries are employing diverse tools for the same goal of visualizing rich data, from very fancy like anychart and axiis, to powerful applications supporting millions of data-points like chronoscope.
Cross-cultural differences in symbols
December 13, 2009At the moment I am in Singapore conducting cross-cultural research on visualization, and -beside experimenting – I’ve also been hunting for differences in the use of visualization around the city.
Despite Singapore is quite western, and English is the major language, I noticed a consistent use of visualization on packaging instructions and posters explaining rules of behaviors. This might be due to the fact that there are 4 national languages, and not everybody understand English (new immigrants or older folks), so vignettes are an effective way to communicate across language differences.
Here’s a picture I took in Chinatown, the toilet sign! š
Information visualization on BBC
December 6, 2009The BBC magazine recently featured an article about how information visualization is becoming a serious business to overcome information overload and help readers understand information more easily. The article shows beautiful infovis examples by David McCandless, author of the book “Information is Beautiful” which will be published in February by Collins in UK.