Tag Galaxy is another in a long line of Flickr API visualizations. While I’ve seen several tag based visualizations for Flickr this one is particularly playful. You can move the globe, click on an image, and see more information about the photo. Most of the other tag visualizations for Flickr that I’ve seen when you click on the image to see a larger size, or learn more you leave the visualization and go straight to Flickr. I like that you stay in context with Tag Galaxy to view more. The project was created by Steven Wood of Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg. Nice work.

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Image driven scholarship is a lofty goal, however, MIT’s Visualizing Cultures has created a wonderful visual learning space. I spent quite some time tonight going through the site and throughly enjoyed it. As they state, ” Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto largely inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). I love the idea and the site, however, the top drop-down menu at the top of the page started to bother me over time. Since this is the main navigation for the site it might be nice if it was a breadcrumb rather than a poppy drop-down. I still like the site very much.

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UbiGraph is a tool for visualizing dynamic graphs. The basic version is free, and talks to Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C, C++, C#, Haskell, and OCaml. Version 1.0 is distributed as two separate components. The server application, which renders graphs, is distributed as a compiled binary. The client bindings, which use XMLRPC, are distributed under an open source license. The software uses dynamic, multilevel graph layout for quick convergence of graph layouts. It uses XMLRPC for cross-language and distributed graph support, OpenGL for rendering, and Pthreads for parallelism. The software is also free and easy to use.

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San Francisco is a very windy city. Because I live here I’m always very curious about the wind patterns. Now because of Francis Ludwig along with some code provided by Nick Thompson I have a way to visualize this. As Francis states, “This new visualization scheme was devloped independently by Nick Thompson who has kindly allowed us use of it. While this may initialy appear to be a time-series animation it is instead a dynamic rendering of particle streaklines. Rather than evolving through time the animation is describing the flow of the wind at a given time.”

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There is a current trend in visualizations to show trends, and statistics to let us all know what is going in the world we live in, and I for one applaud it. Worldometers shows real time numbers created by an, “algorithm that processes the latest and most accurate statistical data available together with its estimated progression to compute the current millisecond number to be displayed on each counter based on the specific time set on each visitor’s computer clock.” Var cool. The most interesting thing about this site is the disparagy in the statistics. For example, the difference in energy produced this year (3,950,168,504) and the amount of solar energy striking the earth this year (908,355,014,564). BTW, these change every millisecond so by the time the post was finished the numbers had gone up significantly. This site reminds me of a large lED sign that was up in NYC for some time that showed the U.S. National Debt. Every time I walked past it made me think. This site does the same thing. Check it out and think about the numbers you see.

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