Information Visualization

Information Visualization with Steve Duenes (2010), Nicholas Felton (2011)

Students were asked to visualize a section within the permanent collection at MoMA or the Met. Or, they may visualize a single sporting event or season. Or, a personal collection of their choosing. The project must include substantial quantitative data, a main visualization, supporting figures and a plan for interactivity.

• John Finley : 76 years of 24 Hours of Le Mans

  

  Since 1923, motorsports’ top drivers have competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the oldest sports car endurance race in the world. This chart sheds light on three areas of how the race has changed over the years: the distance and lap counts needed to win, the most winningest drivers at Le Mans, and how the track itself has been modified to enhance the event.

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• JoJo Glick : A 3-Month Look at JoJo’s Texts

  

  The data set consisted of almost 12,000 text messages sent and received within the first three months of 2011. The texts were broken down by minute over the course of a 24 hour period. The minutes were then grouped into half hour blocks. Finally the top five most frequent text buddies were determined and graphed accordingly.

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• Sera Koo : A Look into a Skoo Sized Closet

  

  In September 2010, I packed up my belongings and dived into the New York City life by way of California. With a change of scenery came a drastic change in living space, particularly the closet. “A Skoo Sized Closet” breaks down my closet and explores who and what I’m wearing, discovering along the way that my shoebox life in New York City actually extends far beyond Manhattan. It turns out that a small closet might be just a myth after all. And maybe, you really are what you wear.

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• Christopher Cannon : Confessions of a Former Record Collector

  

  This final project for Information Visualization cataloged half a lifetime of record collecting and attending live music shows. Once laboriously and manually entered into a spreadsheet, this raw data was fed into Processing to help illustrate record years of release, genre, format, color and label. This data was compared to the total number of live shows attended, locations of shows, band’s hometowns and frequency of individual band show attendances.

• Erin Moore : Cross Country Bicycle Trip

  

  In the summer of 2002 I rode my bicycle 3,959 miles from New Haven, CT to Seattle, Washington. The trip took me across 10 states and one Canadian province over the course of 64 days. I kept meticulous route notes and tracked everything from what I ate for breakfast each morning to how many flat tires I got, and even logged how many roadkill I saw. My project visualizes my route, points to key events, and includes elevation profiles for each state.

• Catherine Young : DrawHappy: A Global Art Project on Drawing Your Happiness

  

  For years, I have been fascinated with happiness – its arbitrariness as well as our insistence on quantifying it. This investigation led me to Iceland, one of the happiest places in the world. In asking people what made them happy, I realized that one of the most universal and clearest ways to record their responses was to ask them to draw what made them happy. Drawing is one of the earliest skills we learn; its basic elements are comprehensible to people of all ages, cultures and nations. I reasoned that if people knew that they were happy, they should be able to identify the source and moreover, visually embody this joy. I decided to visualize the results of this ongoing art and social experiment, and to attempt to plot their responses on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a way to qualify these instead of putting them on a metric. Visit www.drawhappy.org or follow @idrawhappy for more details.

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• Allison Shaw : Five Years of Music: Allison Shaw, 2006-2011

  

  Using data generated from a physical CD collection, iTunes library, and a Last.fm account, “Five Years of Music: Allison Shaw, 2006-2011” is an LP insert sized booklet. With this visualization, I measured the growth of my music collection, and compared the portion of the collection that is digital versus physical. To no one’s surprise, digital music has increased its share quite steadily over the last five years. I also used the data to show my True Allegiance (music that appears both in my physical and digital libraries), Collection DNA (which shows the genres in my libraries), Time Running (the amount of time I’ve spent listening to music since 2006), and my Top Twenty artists. The visual style has been highly influenced by Nicolas Felton and Francesco Franchii.

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• Clint Beharry : Haunted: A Guggenheim New York Art Exhibit

  

  “Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance / Sculpture” is an exhibit shown at the Guggenheim New York between March 26 - September 6, 2010. This information visualization shows all pieces in the exhibit, which media they used, which themes they were curated under, where they were located, and how much space they occupied on the spiral rotunda.

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• Gene Lu : Heat Effects on Marathon Runners

  

  There are many variables that determine the finishing times of marathon runners. Some variables are fixed (e.g. elevation) while others cannot be controlled (e.g. temperature, wind speed). This infographic explores the relationship between finishing time and temperature within the past ten years of the New York City Marathon.

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• Jeff Kirsch : Longball Leaders

  

  A final project for Information Visualization with Steve Duenes, “Longball Leaders” looks at the week-by-week home run tallies for the top 15 MLB players in 2009, compared against the season-end totals of the top 5 all-time leaders.

• David Bellona : Phillumeny: A Collection of Matchbooks & Matchboxes

  

  When I was younger, I collected everything from Pez dispensers and coins to kachinas and bottle tops. For our final project, I decided to create a book that documented and visualized my matchbook collection — one that dated back to my grandfather’s business trips around the U.S. The book can viewed here along with my process.

• Michael Katayama : Play Ball! East Meets West

  

  Baseball has been an All-American past time that has turned International. This chart uses the data from the 42 baseball players from Japan that have played in the Major Leagues through the 2009 season. The first player, Masanori Murakami played in 1964-65. It would be 30 years before Hideo Nomo would make his debut for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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• Beatriz Vizcaino : Shaping Modernity

  

  Information visualization of a part of the exhibition “Shaping Modernity: Design 1880-1980” at the MoMA.

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• Colleen Miller : The Curse of Billy Penn

  

  No city with teams in the four major professional sports leagues has gone longer without a title that Philadelphia — it was a 25 year span from 1983 (when the 76ers hoisted the N.B.A. trophy) until 2008, when the Phillies won the World Series. This information graphic showcases the highs that always ended in disappointment, and the losing streaks that made it seem like it would never happen. This graphic attempts to represent the reason why Philly fans are notoriously the angriest fans of all.

• Russ Maschmeyer : The Die Hard Index

  

  The Die Hard Index determines the quality of a sports team’s fans, or more specifically, the degree to which fans will continue to buy tickets, even when the economy is poor, ticket prices are sky high, and they have a losing team.

  After a long night of looking at the numbers for the 2009 Major League Baseball Season, I arrived at the formula to the right, and the map below. I hope you find the results relatively congruent with your own home team experiences.

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• Evinn Quinn : Tomahawk to 3 Peat

  

  A visualization of how Shaun White won the Winter X Games 2010…before the Olympics.

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