Why Patrons, Customers, Librarians, Etc. Go Online – Intent Index Results…07.29.09

Thanks to Stephen Abram of  Stephen’s Lighthouse for his post Why Do People Go Online for drawing attention to the Ruder Finn Intent Index research data and interactive visualization- click on image below.

Key Role of Visualization in Communication…07.16.09

Ed Batista, executive coaching and change management expert,  has yet another short but powerful post today Visual Images and Effective Communication that is increasingly relevant to practicing librarians of all stripes which is excerpted below. His previous work has demonstrated his effective use of visualization to communicate his message.

“…Although my reliance on static images falls short on the interactive front, these concepts certainly underlie my recent posts on a framework for professional and personal development, the importance of time horizons, and the nature of influence.

And these same concepts explain why I’m continually drawn to the efforts of designers like Dustin Curtis and writers like Virginia Postrel, who highlight the utility of good design while also doing work that just looks great. There’s also a connection with the work of Howard Gardner on influence–he notes that “A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other,” and with a particular emphasis on alternative visual forms of representation…”

Visualizing the Petabyte…07.08.09

Thanks to Stephen’s Lighthouse for pointing out the following very cool and good description of a petabyte titled “Visualizing the Petabye Age” posted on Gizmodo in How Large is a Petabyte:

TagCrowd – Create Your Own Text Clouds…04.07.09

Thanks to Michael Sauers for pointing out TagCrowd where you can “Create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency.”

“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.)..”

Give it a try!

“TwitterThoughts” – Charts Based on Twitter Tweets…03.23.09

Since Twitter is so important and I really like cool data visualizations, I thought I would highlight TwitterThoughts today which describes it self as follows:

“TwitterThoughts creates charts based on Twitter tweets in combination with lots of APIs: From a sample of 600 tweets/minute served by the Twitter Api that we send to Yahoo Pipes where it extracts all phrases from the tweet text and the latitude/longitude with use of Yahoo YQL. This Yahoo Pipe outputs serialized PHP back to our local update script that grabs every tweet and phrase and puts it in our MySql database. Daily overviews for fast rendering of the chart data are generated with a daily CRON update. Finally Google Visualization API generates an interactive flash chart based on our JSON data feed.”

Check out the Twitter Activity Worldmap (last 24 hrs) and more.

Two Twitter Visualizations – Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent…03.17.09

Here are 2 Twitter visualization tools I like that I learned about from Mashable! by Ben Parr:

“Monitter is a real-time visualization of of Twitter trends. Type in keywords and see tweets as they occur. It’s the ultimate way to keep informed at a conference (i.e. #SXSW) or to see retweets in action. Monitter also provides geographic searches of tweets and the ability to turn the stream into an RSS feed…”

“TwitterThoughts is an advanced tool and mashup that visually graphs Twitter trends based on a variety of factors, such as number of tweets and followed total. It takes its information from a sample subset of Twitter accounts. The data can be complicated to work with, but it is a unique way to visualize data on Twitter. It also comes with a world Twitter map and a list of recent top Twitter trends…”

BTW, Twitter is GROWING FAST as Adam Ostrow points out in Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent:

“…The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in one month as well, as in January, Twitter.com clocked in with 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month…”

New “Map of Knowledge”…03.16.09

“A new map of knowledge based on electronic data searches in which users moved from one journal to another, thus establishing associations between them. Click here for a full-sized version. ”  

“…In the map, published in the current issue of PLoS One, the journals are color-coded as follows: physics, pink; chemistry, blue; biology, green; medicine, red; social sciences, yellow; and humanities, white. The interconnecting lines reflect the probability that a reader will click from one journal to another on the computer screen…”

Source: New York Times today.

VizEd Visualization “6 Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work”…03.05.09

On Jane’s E-Learnig Tip of the Day today, Jane Hart links to a great visualization done by VizEd of her posting 6 Ways To Make Web2.0 Work.  

Visit VizEd’s post today 6 Ways To Make Web2.0 Work to see the really cool Flash visual animation they created which they describe as “Visual Animation of McKinseys report “6 Ways To Make Web2.0 Work” as understood by us.” It might be a tool you may want to use to teach Library 2.0 principles.

See the visual animation 6 Ways To Make Web2.0 Work 

“Choosing a Good Chart”…01.19.09

Since presentations and representations of data are critical for librarians, I found the Choosing a good chart [http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/choosing_a_good.html] post by Andre Abela which highligts a flow chart on The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method interesting and helpful:  

“Here’s something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny’s classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed).  

Download pdf. ”

Visuwords…10.25.08

Here is an interesting post from Beyond the Reference Desk blog [http://beyondrefdesk.blogspot.com/] so you can check out “Visuwords”:

“This is a neat little tool that I came across while doing some research today. From the Visuwords website:

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

It’s a free to use tool, and a great product for students, teachers, writers, and librarians alike. 

Here is a screen shot for my search of pedagogy:

Here is a zoomed-in shot, providing a better idea of how the results look:

I’m definitely going to point this out to students. I think it’s a neat way to assist with brainstorming those keywords. Plus, the dictionary feature when you hover over a word or phrase is pretty nifty!…”