Spotted: TreeMatrix: A Hybrid Visualization of Compound Graphs

Looks related to our lab's work and Fekete and inria's. 

TreeMatrix: A Hybrid Visualization of Compound Graphs

CG Forum

Abstract

We present a hybrid visualization technique for compound graphs (i.e. networks with a hierarchical clustering defined on the nodes) that combines the use of adjacency matrices, node-link and arc diagrams to show the graph, and also combines the use of nested inclusion and icicle diagrams to show the hierarchical clustering. The graph visualized with our technique may have edges that are weighted and/or directed. We first explore the design space of visualizations of compound graphs and present a taxonomy of hybrid visualization techniques. We then present our prototype, which allows clusters (i.e. subtrees) of nodes to be grouped into matrices or split apart using a radial menu. We also demonstrate how our prototype can be used in the software engineering domain, and compare it to the commercial matrix-based visualization tool Lattix using a qualitative user study.

Find: Device Usage on the Social Web

Great information. Tells us something about how people use their devices, not just when. 

Eg desktops are work machines, tablets are pleasure. Tabs and consoles have surprisingly similar usage patterns. Phones, tabs and consoles reach much more deeply into our personal lives than pcs. 

Don't like having to divide by 7 in the chart though. Think, please!

Oh and, what's up with gamers on Thursday at 5?

Device Usage on the Social Web

bitly blog

We use our phones differently than our laptops, and our tablets differently than our gaming devices. We decided to take a deep look into the bitly data to figure out exactly how differently, and we found some surprises!

We analyzed the bitly data for the entire year of 2011 to understand how people use different hardware devices, and how this changes the way that people consume information. We looked at two types of data, the raw numbers and the use percentages (to make different platforms with wildly varying usage levels easy to compare). Web browsers were still the primary tool for accessing online content, followed by smart phones, tablets and gaming machines.

How are bitly links used across different platforms?

Desktop computers are most heavily used on weekdays before noon. Phone traffic peaks at roughly the same time. Tablets are most used at Tuesday at 5pm. Gaming devices (Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Playstation), Thursday at 5pm.

One of the most interesting patterns is the peak, small valley and then another peak that both phones and tablets exhibit. The second peak is roughly at the same level Monday through Thursday, but drops off on Friday and doesn’t appear on the weekends.  This pattern is shifted over for tablets, with the second peak occurring later in the evening. This reflects the aggregate behavior patterns with these devices, showing us when the world is sleeping, eating, and taking a mid-afternoon coffee break.

Which platforms have similar usage patterns?

In the above plot, similar behavior is colored white; very different behavior is colored dark blue. From this plot we can see three surprising insights:

• Windows and Linux users behave similarly on the social web! Geeks aren’t that different from the rest of the world. :)
• Mac OS X is used more like a mobile device than either Windows or Linux on the desktop.
• The Kindle is used in a very different manner to engage with the social web. We find that the majority of Kindle usage is much later in the evening than other devices.

From this data, we can say that device should definitely be a consideration when you create and share content on the social web. Think carefully about the physical context of how people will read your content! If you’re making a tablet application, make sure you test it with someone late at night lying in bed, and if you’re making an early-morning newsletter, you know exactly what time and device to target it at.

This post lovingly crafted by the bitly science team.

Find: Unicode over 60 percent of the web

Good bye ASCII. 

Unicode over 60 percent of the web

Google

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.

Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.

Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:

*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings by script. We detect the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages just contain ASCII characters, for example. Thanks again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.

Viz: Yikes! Animation Charts Modern Global Warming

Green Blog: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming

NYT > Science

In the animation, reds indicate temperatures that were higher than average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, and blues indicate lower temperatures.

Viz: Yikes! Animation Charts Modern Global Warming

Green Blog: Animation Charts Modern Global Warming

NYT > Science

In the animation, reds indicate temperatures that were higher than average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, and blues indicate lower temperatures.

Find: WebGL Playground

WebGL Playground

GameDev News

WebGL playground is a straightforward idea: type in your WebGL script and see the results. But the cool part is that the editor and the results are just on the same page and that you get a handful of features that make your life easier.

Sent with Reeder

Competition: Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions

A competition in news oriented visualization and apps. 

Data Journalism Awards now accepting submissions

Google

Last November, we announced our support for a new Data Journalism competition, organized by the Global Editors Network. The competition is now open to submissions and today we hosted an event at our offices in London to share details on how to compete and win a total of six prizes worth EUR 45,000. The European Journalism Centre is running the contest and Google is sponsoring.

Journalism is going through an exciting—if sometimes wrenching—transition from off to online. Google is keen to help. We see exciting possibilities of leveraging data to produce award-winning journalism. “Data journalism is a new, exciting part of the media industry, with at present only a small number of practitioners,” said Peter Barron, Google’s Director of External Relations. “We hope to see the number grow.”

In data journalism, reporters leverage numerical data and databases to gather, organize and produce news. Bertrand Pecquerie, the Global Editor Network’s CEO, believes the use of data will, in particular, revolutionize investigative reporting. “We are convinced that there is a bright future for journalism,” he said at the London event. “This is not just about developing new hardware like tablets. It is above all about producing exciting new content.”

The European Journalism Centre, a non-profit based in Maastricht, has been running data training workshops for several years. It is producing the Data Journalism Awards website and administering the prize. “This new initiative should help convince editors around the world that data journalism is not a crazy idea, but a viable part of the industry,” says Wilfried Ruetten, Director of the center.

Projects should be submitted to http://www.datajournalismawards.org. The deadline is April 10, 2012. Entries should have been published or aired between April 11, 2011 and April 10, 2012. Media companies, non-profit organisations, freelancers and individuals are eligible.

Submissions are welcomed in three categories: data-driven investigative journalism, data-driven applications and data visualisation and storytelling. National and international projects will be judged separately from local and regional ones. “We wanted to encourage not only the New York Times’s of the world to participate, but media outlets of all sizes,” says Pecquerie. “Journalism students are also invited to enter, provided their work has been published.”

An all-star jury has been assembled of journalists from prestigious international media companies including the New York Times, the Guardian and Les Echos. Paul Steiger, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica, will serve as president.

Winners will be announced at the Global News Network’s World Summit in Paris on May 31, 2011.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations