ARTS2090 Week8

Visualization-

       The word visualization has different aspects in different contexts, such as mental image, creative visualization, motor imagery, flow visualization and etc...(Wikipedia visualization) According to dictionary.com, the definitions of visualization are : 1. to recall or form mental images or pictures. 2. to make visual or visible. 3. to form a mental image of. 4. to make perceptible to the mind or imagination. The second assignment in this course contains all of the definitions. Students have to create a visualization(first and third definition) that makes the invisible visible (second definition). The visualization can reveal something that is hidden or invisible through information representations based on the data base(fourth definition).

       I have came across an interesting "visualization" from another course, (http://www.phototrails.net/lines-users-matrix/ for some reason this cannot be opened right now, maybe this website will be fixed soon). It is a visualization of 289 most popular Instagram users in Tel Aviv, during three months, each time when they published a photo, a green, red and orange dot is recorded which represents the day of the time the photo was taken in morning, afternoon, and night respectively. A line is connected when the photo was published in the same hour. As a result we can analyze and study the pattern created by each individual 289 users. Some of the users do not have any line connected within the dots, it is surprising for me that the user did not publish any photos within the same hour during three months. In comparison, some users do not have any dots, which means the user has a habit of publishing their photos during the same time, for example morning photos and coffee tweets. This visualization allows us to study and compare the usage and pattern of each individual Instagram users. There are billions of visualizations, each of them represents and discovers the relationship between different factors. For the visualization above, it explores time, similarity, and number of photos published vs 289 individual users.