Tuesday, February 14, 2006

The Dumpster (Happy Valentine's Day!)

Off Information Aesthetics, the Dumpster is a visualization of breakups described on blogs in 2005, with sample color commentary from the posts. It's very pretty, and of course it was made in processing.

6 comments :

Anonymous said...

Hmm, processing looks kind of neat.

Lynn said...

Way more than kind of neat!! Many of the coolest vis apps on the web now were done in it, from the purely artsy to purely info and anywhere in between. I haven't yet had enough time to play with it. I have a task or two for it eventually, though...

Anonymous said...

I'm always reluctant to enthuse too much about neatness until I try it. So many things look neat but then suck if a newbie tries to use them...

However, I've just lost like three hours to Processing, futzing with visualizing something I wasn't even that interested in seeing but could easily come up with the data for.

Processing is indeed way more than kind of neat.

Lynn said...

I'm jealous -- I haven't gotten as far as reading in any of my own data yet. Feel free to share your visualizations :-) I am a data-viewing junkie.

Anonymous said...

http://xythian.net/2006/02/16/posts.gif

It's gone through slightly cooler iterations, but I haven't saved them.

It's (currently) a plot of time (x) vs feed id (y) with a point for every post from the last several months of running my RSS fetcher. Sadly, I wasn't keeping the data I really wanted, so I ended up having to use the modified time on the post rather than the first time I saw it, but I can go back and regenerate the data I want once I figure out if I actually have anything worth seeing. So far, probably not, but it's handy to have some data-looking thing if you want to play with visualization.

I've also installed RPy but so far haven't used it to tell me anything I didn't already know ("post size tends to be smaller for more frequent posters").

So far all my work has been "python script of varying complexity grunges around and makes a data file" followed by "feed data file to Processing to draw stuff. I haven't yet tried to animate or make a UI.

Anonymous said...

(The sudden stop of several feeds in the image is when I unsubscribed from a bunch of things. Many of the feeds also start after the zero date (which was last May sometime) since I subscribed later.