From Adobe: “Join Stanford University’s Geoff McGhee for a discussion of “data storytelling,” best practices for data visualization, and using visual interfaces to explore large data sets. McGhee — who produced multimedia and infographics for The New York Times, Le Monde, and ABC News — now helps Stanford scholars develop new tools and techniques for exploring and sharing research.”
Free Seminar: Thursday, January 26: 10–11 a.m. PST; 1–2 p.m. EST

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed as the part of their Simile project open-source web widgets for data visualizations. The Simile project “focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.” [Simile] . Check out Timeline which visualizes temporal information on an interactive drag-able timeline; Exhibit which creates web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML; Timeplot which plots time series and overlay temporal events over them; and Runway which displays images in a Coverflow-like visualization and is in my view probably the least useful one.

Nature published a special package titled “Looking at the Best Cities for Science” by Richard Van Noorden showcasing interactive graphics. The analysis which is provided by Elsevier shows how absolute counts of publications per city and relative citation impact have changed from 2000 to 2008. The chart is animated with a slider at the bottom to fast forward in time. You can click on individual cities and drag the time slider to compare their changing output over time. Notable is Pittsburgh’s surge in research output.

Published on March 5th in the NYT: “For the last three years, Gallup has called 1,000 randomly selected American adults each day and asked them about indicators of their quality of life. Responses are converted to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Here are the 2010 results, sorted by Congressional districts.” The map is nicely done with features like zooming and switching between different criteria. While the direction of the legend is always the same (dark for better), it needs a bit of getting used to as the same color represents all criteria ranging from obesity to nighttime safety.
See yourself: NYT map.

I have read a very interesting article titled “Where Cinema and Biology Meet” in the New York Times published on November 15, 2010 by Erik Olsen. It showcases Dr. Lue who is one of the pioneers of molecular animation, “a rapidly growing field that seeks to bring the power of cinema to biology.” The visualizations are stunning, like the series of images from an animation depicting how proteins move across the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. I was especially intrigued by the “Powering the Cell: Mitochondria” which can be found on the NYT Website as well as on the Harvard Website. “I think visualization is going to be the key to the future,” Dr. McGill said.
More about visualizations can be found at the BioCommunications Association which is an international professional association of people working in the biological communications field.

I have recently discovered the Google Public Data Explorer which helps you to make large data sets to explore, visualize and communicate. While most charts and graphs displaying quantitative data can easily be printed without loosing fidelity and in fact are often enhanced by the higher resolution available by modern printers sometimes displaying data on a computer can add value. The charts and maps animated over time are examples of such added value since “the changes in the world become easier to understand.” [Google]
For instance, the first chart ​”correlates life expectancy and number of children per woman for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and the colors represent different regions of the world. You can also click on the play button to see data change over time.” [Google] Check it out!

On FastCompany, I found a blog entry by Dan Nosowitz titled “Infographic: Googles, How Do They Work?” Interestingly, the infographic on the PPCBlog uses simulated paper snippets to showcase the inner workings of Google. In the old days, we used to argue that large visuals cannot be displayed well on a computer because of the lack of resolution. This applied particularly for large and complex graphs which then got split up into several screens–and often lost their appeal in the process. However, nowadays this is not an issue anymore as this complex infographic demonstrates well. Is this the beginning of the end of paper?

I have found a new book about the visualization of complex data by Katy Börner. Here a description from the publisher: “Atlas of Science, based on the popular exhibit ‘Places & Spaces: Mapping Science,’ describes and displays successful mapping techniques. The heart of the book is a visual feast: Claudius Ptolemy’s Cosmographia World Map from 1482; a guide to a PhD thesis that resembles a subway map; ‘the structure of science’ as revealed in a map of citation relationships in papers published in 2002; a visual periodic table; a history flow visualization of the Wikipedia article on abortion; a globe showing the worldwide distribution of patents; a forecast of earthquake risk; hands-on science maps for kids; and many more. Each entry includes the story behind the map and biographies of its makers.”
There is a PDF with 8 sample pages which looks very interesting. Katy Börner is Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.

Yesterday, I was preparing a poster for the “2010 CTSA Informatics Key Function Committee All-Hands Meeting” held at the Natcher Auditorium, NIH campus in Bethesda, MD on October 13-14, 2010. We will showcase some usage data of Digital Vita, an application developed by the University of Pittsburgh, which integrates CV management functions with academic social networking and basic research team management and collaboration functions. Initially, the graphs were created using basic functions in Microsoft Excel (see example in Figure 1):

I have converted these graphs into Photoshop, replacing the non-data-bearing frame with a y-axis indicating the range and changing the graph type to reflect that we combine cumulative data and non-cumulative data in one chart. In addition, I have labeled the data directly instead of using a legend reducing the cognitive load for the viewer. I first made a screen shot of the Excel graph and imported it into Photoshop, then I used the vector graph shape tools to draw the chart allowing me to scale it without quality loss. I ended up creating several 700 pixel high JPEGs which I inserted into a Microsoft PowerPoint poster template used by our Department of Biomedical Informatics (see example in Figure 2).

On March 16, 2009, Katrina Kelner, editor of Science Translational Medicine, Managing Editor, Research Journals, Science Magazine gave a talk at NIH which was titled “Publishing in Journals” (sponsored by the NIH Office of Intramural Training & Education). About 7 min into the talk she made a really important point regarding the use of figures: She emphasized that in the past the “printed figure was your data.” However, this was only true in the print publishing-only world. Now, with the advent of digital publishing, the figures in the paper serve only as examples or as an interpretation of the data because there is now the capacity to provide the actual data online for everybody to download and rerun the analysis.
She also talks about image manipulations using Adobe Photoshop and explains what is allowed and what is not allowed. Dr. Kelner shows various examples of gel images/micrographs and what was done to them. Her description includes what are appropriate and what are inappropriate manipulations and what needs to be explicitly declared.
Listen to the enhanced video podcast (mp4, 1:32) or see the overview information about the podcast.