Presentation on David McCandless

Here are my slides

Citations

McCandless,David. Snake Oil,  InfoGraph, 2011.http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/.

McCandless,David.The Billion Dollar Gram,  InfoGraph, 2010. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-billion-dollar-gram/

McCandless,David.The Sunscreen Smokescreen,  InfoGraph, 2011.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2011/the-sunscreen-smokescreen/

McCandless,David.What Does China Censor Online?,  InfoGraph, 2010.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/what-does-china-censor-online/

McCandless, David. "The beauty of data visualization." TED Talk. November 23 2012. Web, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zg-C8AAIGg.

McCandless ,David. "Bio." Accessed March 02, 2013. http://www.davidmccandless.com/bio/.

McCandless, David. The Guardian, "David McCandless." Accessed February 26, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidmccandless.

Reading Response #4

Within this article Mitchell Whitelaw talks about the different between data and information and how it pertains to art. People do normally interchange there meaning and I am glad Mitchell shows and explains the difference between them. I learned this in data management which is why I would never interchanged them.

Data- a collection of raw material.

Information - a meaning that is derived from data.

Through out this course we have learned that every info graph has a story behind it. What does the information in this graph mean? What is the concept? To hear something as a data graph/art is a bit odd to me, for data means nothing, data has no context. Something without a context can't have a meaning and without that meaning what is the point to the art work? What is the artist trying to show? What story are they trying to tell me as a view? Well the answer to all the questions is nothing because as I mentioned, data is nothing. But this raises a different point which I believe in, that data graphs/ art work don't exist. Here me out for a second and I maybe wrong but like I said this is my opinion. When a user looks at an art work, they try to interpret a meaning. When presented a data piece like Dragulescu’s work where the "data isn't important" that is not the case. For the user is trying to interpret the meaning, they are seeing your piece, looking at your data and themselves are trying to find a definition to the work. The user is making that data art work into an information work by giving it meaning. As I mentioned above, a data piece will never exist because the user will always try to make meaning to an art work.

This also goes into the idea of “junk is structure” or “structure is junk” as well as "everything is everything". I personally believe that junk is structure. It comes down to the fact that an art piece will always have a meaning, because people will constantly try to interpret. The real beauty here is that art has a special connection with each user including the artist itself. Where there is no right way to interpret a piece, for the artist interpretation of there own work is not the right answer.

I hope I explained myself properly and I hope I didn't get to far off from the article topic. This is just the process my mind took when I read the article.

Reading Response 3

Alex Ormat's Roller Coaster info graph is what I decided to critique for my reading response. I would first like to state that this graph is very appealing and that is due to the simplicity of the way it was designed. The orange and blue fonts were contrasting to one another, which brought it out more. I like how he added the clouds, it reminds me of what he is showing in his graph, how high the roller coaster are. At first I wondered what the graph's axis were and was going to recommend that he label his axis, but with a little bit of interaction that fixed my curious issue. He nicely showed the roller coaster high with the mouse pointer. As you moved the cursor across the graph it showed the height and well as the speed. Once over a roller coaster it showed you it height and speed in a better font and gave it a better presentation. When clicked it not only pointed to it location on the map (real liked this idea) but it also showed you how many drops it had by the number of cars that was dropping from the graph to its location on the map. Finally he showed you an POV of the roller coaster. I don't know how he got these video shots, but it was a nice add to the graph.

Personally, I thought the added cars representing number of drops wasn't the best way to represent the number of drops. It would of been better to put more curves in the line that was going to the map (representing more drops). I also wasn't a fan of the video, yes it added something more to the graph but to sit there looking at it for a long period of time isn't my cup of tea.

Other then that as I mentioned before, the design of the graph was fantastic, the graph was nice and simple and the mouse cursor over the graph was very unique and nicely implemented. The fonts made an outstanding (pun intend) look on the entire graph and made sure your focus was on the attention of which roller it was and how fast and height it was. (when you placed the cursor over a dot on the graph). Just to repeat my self, I really liked how the roaster coster dropped to it's location on the map. I found that very creative.