Analog Infoviz: Handmade Visualization Toolkit [brainpickings.org] – Columbian designer Jose Duarte creates fresh DIY lo-fi information visualizations, expressed “in the wild,” using a basic toolkit. What do you think – how does this treatment affect the data, versus a standard pie-chart or a slick design-pornish infographic (IMHO, a trend verging on the overbearing. This was reinforced when the trend spawned the term infauxgraphic to describe cases where the visual treatment takes primacy over the accuracy of the information.)?

Using ordinary materials like chalk, string, stickers and balloons, you can experiment with various visualization techniques, from area charts to bubble graphs to – yes, you guessed it – Venn diagrams. Using the kit, he made these lovely lo-fi visualizations of data from the 2010 State of the Internet report, revealing, among other things, that Lady Gaga is bigger on Twitter than Obama and the majority of the world’s email volume is spam.

Above is just one example – the article has plenty of others…and an offer for a free Handmade Visualization Toolkit of your own!

• [from julienorvaisas] An App for Sharing Photos With Friends [NYTimes.com] – [Instagram is betting on word overload, predicting that people will want to share and see their friends' mobile visual feeds rather than text-based snippets.] Instead of following people’s 140-character thoughts, Instagram users can follow their photo stream and get a glimpse of what they ate for lunch and the view from their office. Instagram also plans to introduce a Web site soon. Building a mobile app before a Web site would have been a foreign concept just a few years ago, but Instagram’s founders say that communicating in quick snippets with a phone, on the go, is a new form of communication. The app is free now but Instagram plans to eventually charge a dollar or so for extra filters. “Filters are not the billion-dollar business,” Mr. Systrom said. “It’s photography. The next network is people interested in sharing life visually.”
• [from julienorvaisas] Check Out Tagxedo, A Ridiculously Cool Word Cloud Generator [Tech Crunch] – [Yet another great visualization tool, this one highly customizable, combining word-clouds with images. The impulse to make sense of the word-avalanche on the web by morphing it into infographics is fun and beautiful, for sure, but I wonder whether conveying pretty word-frequency charts is actually providing useful information.] You can use the app to create visually stunning word clouds by inserting words (e.g. speeches, news articles, letters, slogans, themes, and so on). You can do so by uploading a document, entering a URL or simply by pasting text into the appropriate field. Tagxedo will size words appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text, leaving out small words like “is”, “are”, “do”, etc. With just one click, you can rotate the cloud, modify its colors and font, and also alternate between themes and shapes as you please. You can even upload your own images and have the word cloud assume the shape of the image.
• [from steve_portigal] A Spray of DNA to Keep the Robbers Away [NYTimes.com] – [Technology offers new detection methods but the social performance of the tech serves best as prevention] The new system involved a device that sprays a fine, barely visible mist laced with synthetic DNA to cover anyone in its path, including criminals, and simultaneously alerts the police to a crime in progress. The mist — visible only under ultraviolet light — carries DNA markers particular to the location, enabling the police to match the burglar with the place burgled. Now, a sign on the front door of the McDonald’s prominently warns potential thieves of the spray’s presence: “You Steal, You’re Marked.” The police acknowledge that they have yet to make an arrest based on the DNA mist, which was developed in Britain by two brothers, one a policeman and the other a chemist. But they credit its presence — and signs posted prominently warning of its use — for what they call a precipitous decline in crime rates (though they could not provide actual figures to back that up).

• [from julienorvaisas] Is America Mature Enough for This Line Graph of Gay Marriage Poll Results? [VF Daily | Vanity Fair] – [Here's a novel interpretation of a seemingly—ahem—straight-forward infographic; as well as an acknowledgment that your interpretation says as much about yourself as it does about the data.] A new survey of same-sex marriage poll results posted to FiveThirtyEight.com suggests support for gay nuptials is—ahem—on the upswing. As one commenter points out, the site’s statistics overlord, Nate Silver, may also have giggled upon compiling the data: Silver describes a regression line as “fairly sensitive on the endpoints,” which, contextually, is rather raunchy. Do you see a bloated asparagus stalk turned sideways? A close-up of the mouth of a Pac-Man? The tail of a Na’vi? The answer may explain to you your own feelings about same-sex marriage. It’s a Rorschach test of inscrutable accuracy, probably as prescient as the polls themselves.

• Bruce Sterling on the normalcy of the future – [See also our recent interactions piece: We Are Living In A Sci-Fi World]
  They’re phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It’s just: it doesn’t look futuristic. It looks way too real.

  Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.
  (via BoingBoing)

• An interactive map of more than 52,000 prose-literacy profiles across Canada – The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines the following five levels of literacy:

  * Level 1—Very poor literacy skills. An individual at this level may, for example, be unable to determine from a package label the correct amount of medicine to give a child.
  * Level 2—A capacity to deal only with simple, clear material involving uncomplicated tasks. People at this level may develop everyday coping skills, but their poor literacy makes it hard to conquer challenges such as learning new job skills.
  * Level 3—Adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life and work in an advanced society. It roughly denotes the skill level required for successful high-school completion and college entry.
  * Levels 4 and 5—Strong skills. An individual at these levels can process information of a complex and demanding nature.

• How Different Groups Spend Their Day: an Interactive Graphic – The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.