Beauty #1, Two visualizations that catch me

Romeo & Juliet

 

 

When we talk about visualization, we are talking about beautiful pictures. They may be useful or i.e. not only beautiful pictures. But I think as a good visualization, beautiful and well-design are prerequisites. Therefore the first visualization I choose is a visualization of Romeo and Juliet. It is a massive relation graph between Romeo and Juliet. Artist prints Romeo and Juliet in a large paper and connect “Romeo” and “Juliet” with red lines. It is the prettiest static visualization I saw in visual complexity. Red lines represent love and a feeling of massiveness makes me feel the massive love between Romeo and Juliet. I love this because it is not pure data accumulation. The idea reflects a kind of concise design pattern. This visualization offers me only an impression but it can let me interpret something beyond. First of all I will say is that “Romeo and Juliet’s love is massive and a little bit heavy”. Then from the density of color changing in the text, we can interpret their love story from crashing to tragedy ending. As a static visualization, It successfully provides a snapshot/screenshot of a limited time and space. Compared to the original text, which is telling the actual story, It gives a more direct shock to readers/audiences about love. Though we still need to admit that the information is not big enough in amount to let us know everything.

Another example is a dynamic visualization website that deals with real time twitter post. I choose this again, HumanitysNAPbecause of its beauty.Twitter orographies visualizes twitter posts’ word with other high-frequency word connections and show them on a very well designed dynamically website. It is a very interesting product to use. With a single word, we can find how most people in twitter’s way to interpret it and use it. I will stop talking about how good it is now because the potential of this website is very obvious. Instead, I would like to talk about 2 limitations behind the beauty. 1:The low frequency word. If I type in “Porn”, “Digital Humanity”(sadly it is a low frequency word). I get very boring result with no big words (other high frequency words) connected. 2: limitation of “real time”. In real time, It is somehow useful but it is also a limitation in time. For example, I typed in Humanity, It connects with refugees, Germany and ISIS. It should be a result of today’s refugee crisis in Europe. However, humanity in general should connects with DIGITAL. 🙂

 

 


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