The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted an article about the University of Richmond’s Voting America project, which features interactive animation and commentary dealing with US political data from 1840-2008.

While both an interesting tool for personal or reference use, Voting America’s interactive features mostly rely on nicely prepared video presentations of the data. Several other interactive data visualization tools and websites also provide new ways to make thinking about politics, history and the election season at least a bit more interesting and compelling.

For example, how about the visualization below, posted on the data visualization blog Eager Eyes, called “The Traveling Presidential Candidate Map” (much more detail and larger format PDFs available on the Eager Eyes site). This illustrates the shortest routes a candidate would need to travel to reach every zipcode.

Want more interactive elements? Here’s an example of a treemap from IBM’s Many Eyes visualization site:

What does this tell us? You’d be better off looking at the original, interactive graphic that trying to understand this picture…but in a nutshell, it illustrates and compares the links of both Obama’s and McCain’s YouTube videos. Sites like Many Eyes, and to a similar degree, Swivel, can be used rather easily to crunch datasets into visualizations in a short amount of time.

How about something simpler, but just as interesting? What about a ‘Wordle‘ visualization of Michelle Obama’s speech from the Democratic National Convention? (HINT: click the visualization below – you can interact with it right within this blog post).

Speaking of Many Eyes, the team behind the visualization tools and website wrote an interesting blog post back in 2007 called Democratizing VIsualization, which – while focused on new mapping visualizations, really sums up many of these new approaches:

“…the election maps got progressively more sophisticated as people tried to understand voting results. They also illustrated the fact that there are multiple ways of telling the same story. The maps became an essential part of a national debate on politics, a divided country, and what it means to represent complex data.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education features an article this week on literary scholarship that is using technology to investigate new questions with texts that are available online.  New tools, such as Google Earth, are allowing professors to map and sort textual information in new ways and extend the scholarly process into the classroom.

The article takes an in-depth look at an online project, the Map of Early London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria.  The map, using John Stow’s 1598 work A Survey of London, overlays place information contained in literary works produced during the era.  Users at the site can explore proxmity of authors to places mentioned in works, the cultural life of different parts of the city mentioned in literature, people mentioned in connection with specific places, and many other geographic aspects of the texts.

The Chronicle has assembled an audio slide show tour of the Map as part of the article.

Rock group Radiohead recently teamed with Google to create a music video using a new technique. The video was created without using cameras; instead, 3d laser scanners, similar to those typically used to input objects into CAD or 3D software, captured the images used in the video.

The resulting data set, consisting of “points” that outline the objects, was used to create the video. Google is making the data available on their website so that fans can create their own visualizations and share them on YouTube.

You can read more about the effort and see a “making of” video or download the data set at http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/. You can also use an online viewer to manipulate the the data from one “frame” of the video in different ways and make your own visualization.

What are tag/word clouds?

Tag clouds (or ‘word clouds’) are visualizations made up of sets of words from a document, website or set of ‘tags’ (ex: bookmarks from your del.icio.us account). These word collections may use color, word size or even position to better illustrate the frequency of word use. A popular example of word clouds in action would be the recent use of word clouds to analyze presidential speeches. Here’s a screenshot of Chirag Mehta’s tool that creates a word cloud for several presidential speeches:

This cloud reveals the most 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address. The standout terms are obvious. The thing that makes Mehta’s tool really interesting, is that he’s included a ’slider’ (look above the word cloud box) that can be moved to cycle through word clouds from other speeches from the past. Here’s one of Harry Truman’s State of the Union Address speeches:

How Can You Use or Create Tag/Word Clouds?

Several great tools for visualizing text and tags exist on the web. For analyzing del.icio.us tags, extisp.icio.us or the tag tool at Hub Log work just fine. Another popular tool, Tag Crowd, takes things a step further than just sorting del.ico.us tags, and allows users to copy/paste text from documents or even analyze a webpage. Here’s the CIT Strategic Plan for 2008-2011 copy/pasted into Tag Crowd, then filtered down to the 50 most frequently used terms:

Not surprisingly, ‘teaching’, ‘technology’, and ‘faculty’ come up quite a bit. This works well enough, but what if I want to make this look, er…pretty? That’s where Wordle comes in. Here’s the same text from the Strategic Plan pushed through Wordle:

Now, that’s a ‘pretty’ word cloud. Wordle includes several options for enhancing the visualization: multiple font choices, color palettes, and overall layout of the text (ie: horizontal, random, vertical, etc). Wordle creations can be printed out or posted to a public gallery on the web. Here’s another version of the word cloud above, reduced to a frequency of 50 words, with a color palette applied:

The prestigious journal Nature has commissioned a series of articles in which experts speculate on important developments in the next few years in their fields. One of the first is “Chemistry for Everyone“, which describes an ‘open’ approach to chemistry. In this approach, chemists format data to help computers access the scientific literature in order to make scientific information freely available and accessible. This will facilitate better sharing of ideas between professional chemists as well as teachers, students, and anyone interested. For example, CrystalEye is a free web application that gathers open-access crystallographic data and allows it to be searched and manipulated. This article is an exciting look at the future:

“As new ideas and technologies arise, the blogosphere spreads them almost instantaneously. And the message from the blogosphere is clear: the next generation of chemists needs open, integrated, semantic systems.”

Read some of the Chemistry blogs on Chemistry Blogspace.

And if you are looking for service learning ideas in Chemistry, check out the blog Chemists without borders.

A post about open source Chemistry requires mentioning my favorite open source Chemistry project by Jean Claude Bradley. Read about his open notebook laboratory, and get more information about this project here. He makes the process of science totally transparent, shares all lab results (positive and negative), and finds great new collaborators.

To incorporate real-world, current issues in your course, consider using resources recently made available about the human impact on the oceans. There are engaging photos, interactive graphics and accessible articles, which could complement courses on public policy, the environment, biology, chemistry, writing and social sciences, as well as others.

The New York Times has a series of thought-provoking articles and resources about human impact on the seas:

* “Human Shadows on the Seas” reports on the first worldwide portrait of human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

* Pictures of reefs and the scientists working at them are in a slide show “Before they vanish“.

* An interactive map, “Mapping the Other 70 Percent”, allows you to display data on the human impact, shipping, invasive species, temperature, ultraviolet light and acidification.

* An article “Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them” describes recently published research results (listed below) . Comparing the popular press version with essays written by the authors and the scientific research report could be a useful educational opportunity.

PLOS Biology has an open access essay on “Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs” to accompany two research reports published in PLoS ONE. These research reports, “Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands” and “Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands”, are open for online discussion and annotation. Currently, readers can access the Editor’s comments and comments by the Faculty of 1000. Discussing research papers online provides a window into the process of scientific research and showcases critical thinking.

For more information about Coral Reefs, engaging photos and other multimedia, see the Coral Reef Alliance. The resource library section has extensive links to visualizations about changing climate, videos, photographs and other educational organizations.

EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

Would you like to have your students work together to build an annotated map? Google Maps has just added a collaboration feature. When you are creating a personalized, annotated map using the “My Maps” feature of Google Maps, there is a new button entitled “collaborate“. This feature allows you to email an invitation to others to allow them to help annotate the map. For example, a group of students could create a map based on a course reading, annotating placemarks with insightful interpretations. Alternatively, students could map geological features, watersheds or species distributions. Students involved in community projects could place their own pictures together on a map.

Next to the collaborate button on Google Maps is another feature for sharing information. If you’ve found or created a wonderful KML/ KMZ file using Google Earth, and want to share it with someone who does not have access, click the “import” button to upload the file from the web or your computer. You can then send Aunt Mary the link to see your vacation trip, or share the link with your students via Blackboard. Your students or Aunt Mary do not need to have or use Google Earth to see your map.

This is a recently posted video that examines the way information organization is changing with digital media. It compares physical media, which requires a physical location, with digital media, which requires perhaps no more than tags. According to its creator, this video “was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.” See the video on You Tube.

Slate has an online feature as part of their election coverage that allows you to trace the activities of the various Presidential candidates.  Using Google Maps, the page lets you view a timeline of their campaign stops, select candidates to follow and get more information including news and video feeds from YouTube.

The page could be used as a discussion starter for classes, but is also another good example of how Google Maps and other location-based applications are creating new ways to visualize information.

article at Slate.com