February 18, 2005
New Possibilities for Data Visualization
An new generation of commercial and easier-to- use'data' visualization applications are emerging. In a sense, building on Ben Shneiderman and the HCIL at Maryland's work on dynamic database queries and taking advantage of new possibilities with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2.0, these applications begin to visualize multivariate data groupings dynamically by taking simple everyday data programs such as Excel and turning these into interactive data visualization applications. This entry looks at one of these new applications, Infommersion's Xcelsius.
Essentially, Infommersion's Xcelsius takes data from an Excel spreadsheet and fairly easily pulls this through Macromedia Flash to produce datasets that can be visualized in online chart format but also significantly manipulated directly and dynamically. While the product's focus is business/financial oriented, what will be really interesting to see is how this product can be reappropriated and remixed by scientists and social scientists to take their datasets and augment intelligence by allowing us to visualize this data dynamically and see unperceived relationships and trends. The immediate advantage with this application is dealing with multivariate or high-dimensional data where all the variables are interrelated and dependent on each other.
While examples given by the company are largely uninspired (i.e. Retirement Calculator), they are very useful. Up to now, the world of datasets and dataset analysis has largely been the province of mathematicians and statisticians. Visually, tools like Xcelsius are ones to watch out for as they will lead a new direction in aiding cognition. The trick here is to begin research and investigation with creative interface possibilities. Reimagination needs to occur both towards the conventiional divide between statistics and visualization but also towards medium possibilities online.
Posted by at February 18, 2005 4:11 PM | TrackBack