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September 22, 2008
Embedding Google Book Images
Google Operating System shows a simple way to embed Google Books on a web site. There are two other Google APIs available at Google Code. One shows you how to integrate search results from Google Books into your application and the other lets you create what they call "smart searches". An example would be creating a Google branded button that links to a specific Google Book preview page, like this. Here is a list of some of the ways universities and publishers are using these APIs.Posted by swortman at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2008
Visualizing the Next President
Here are a couple word clouds from the texts of both the McCain and Obama acceptance speeches from their respective conventions. The larger the word, the more often it was used in the speech. Interesting way to visualize the ideas presented.
McCain's Acceptance Speech
Obama's Acceptance Speech
These images were created using Wordle, something I always thought of as a sort of fun toy to experiment with but in a case like this it makes an interesting analytical tool. What brought this to my attention was the visualization site Many Eyes. This site is a collaborative interactive visualization project created by IBM's Collaborative User Experience (CUE) research group.
Many Eyes, as its name implies brings together a social network of people who can freely add data sets and experiment with different ways of presenting or visualizing that data. Wordle graphics are only one of many innovative tools on the site. You can make plain old bar charts and pie charts but you can also make bubble charts, word trees and tree maps.
A recent article in the May 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, Emerging Graphic Tools Gets People Talking has an example of a treemap which shows relative faculty sizes and relative average salaries at large universities. There is no direct link to this article but here is a link to a bibliography of articles on visual communication collected by IBM's Visual Communication Lab which includes a direct link to the article.
Posted by swortman at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)