January 24, 2012
The State of the Union, in Charts, Graphs, Images and Pac-Man
The White House billed the 2012 State of the Union address as the “most interactive State of the Union ever”, and part of their efforts was an “enhanced broadcast” that included a large amount of charts, graphs and images.
In case you missed the enhanced broadcast, we’ve included screencaps of the images below.
Overall, it was really nice to see the White House using technology to help better explain the often confusing nuances of politics. They produced an enhanced broadcast last year, but this year’s version felt much more considered and visually appealing.
Of course we would have liked to see more .... read on ›
January 20, 2012
Periscopic Featured in Print Magazine
We’re honored to be featured in the February issue of Print Magazine.
Their article, Data Swims Upstream, is an interview with Periscopic co-founder Dino Citraro and highlights our sustainability efforts, our creative process, and the role we see data visualization playing in a world of information overload.
Here’s an excerpt:
In general, data visualizations deal with facts. Sometimes they can be manipulated to support a specific point of view, but for the most part, the raw data lets you take an objective look at what’s actually going on, and then draw a conclusion.
Unfortunately, things are becoming so cloudy now, especially in legislative .... read on ›
December 7, 2011
Our Process
Occasionally people will ask us about our process, and today was one of those days.
So here it is, in all of its cryptic beauty.
It’s simple, really.
(And that’s drawn on our conference table, which is sometimes also part of the process.)
read on ›
November 21, 2011
Our Kiosks at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City
We recently developed the software for two kiosks being used at the swankily newly renovated Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The first one teaches visitors about stop-motion animation and lets you create a short movie. The visitor uses visual assets provided at the stations, moving the elements slightly then capturing an individual frame. The resulting film can be played back and adjusted. The final film can then be emailed or uploaded directly to YouTube.
Our second kiosk, Flipbook Station, allows you to capture frames of video an turn them into a physical flipbook, emulating the .... read on ›
November 9, 2011
Introducing Politilines.com
As you know, we are fans (as well as purveyors) of data visualization. What you might not know is that we are also fans of politics, and our latest data visualization Politilines is a nice blending of the two.
After watching a few of the Republican Primary debates we were compelled to try to make sense of what everyone was actually saying. To do this, we decided to take a look at the words that were most often spoken during the debate, and then map to them to both the major issues, as well as the candidates from which they .... read on ›
October 14, 2011
We’ll Be Speaking at the The 6th Portland Data Visualization Group – Wed, October 19th
We’ve been attending all of the Portland Data Visualization Group meetings, and the next one looks like it will be just as good as past events. It’s going to be on Wednesday, October 19th from 6:30 – 8:30 at Collective Agency. Many more details here.
Great lineup of speakers, including Nate Bergey (where can we buy an ISS-Notify?), Kevin Lynagh, Charlie Loyd, Aaron Parecki, and Periscopic co-founder, Dino Citraro.
Special thanks to Second Story for sponsoring the event!
Looking forward to talking shop with like-minded data-heads.
read on ›
Our Yahoo! Mail Visualization is featured on Infosthetics.com
Many thanks to Andrew at Infosthetics.com for posting about our latest data visualization. Here’s an excerpt from his post:
The Yahoo! Mail Visualization , designed by Periscopic, aims to show of the network processing power required to run a vast emailing service by revealing the streams of keywords that are sent around the globe in real-time.
The geo-located circles on the world map represent the activity and volume of processed emails, totaling to about 5.6 billion emails a day. Current and predicted email traffic is show at the bottom of the screen. A streamgraph shows the top 10 keywords .... read on ›
Our Yahoo! Mail Visualization is Featured on Flowingdata.com
We’re very excited that our latest data visualization is featured on flowingdata.com. Here’s an excerpt:
Hundreds of thousands of emails are sent every second, and yet, you wouldn’t really know it because there aren’t public-facing streams like that of Twitter. Outside your own inbox, how much email is there exactly? Yahoo, in collaboration with information visualization firm Periscopic, shows you how much email they process in real-time with this interactive feature.
The initial view is a world map, and scaled bubbles represent how many emails were currently sent. Hover over continents for user geographic distribution and gigabytes sent.
There’s also .... read on ›
September 27, 2011
Impressions of Tech@State 2011: Connecting Technology With Opportunity
Last week I had an opportunity to attend Tech@State, a relatively unknown event outside the civic realm, hosted by the State Department. The keynote was given by Edward Tufte and his principles and ideas were parroted excitedly by attendees throughout the day. This would normally be fine, however, without a firm background in data literacy, these dictums can be misconstrued.
The sparkline concept was eagerly accepted within the crowd, but I heard people wanting to apply this visual technique to things that aren’t a series or temporal in nature. There were also people who wanted .... read on ›
My Thoughts on O’Reilly’s Strata Summit 2011: The Business of Data
I was fortunate enough to attend the Strata Summit in NYC last week. Loaded with insightful presentations by a number of experts and leaders in the world of data, I found myself captivated. This portion of the conference was all plenary sessions which meant you didn’t have to choose a track (and later regret choosing the wrong one). I greatly appreciated sitting in one room and experiencing the curated stream of speakers.
There were many great sessions, but I will limit this post to a few.
Marc Goodman of Future Crimes gave us a mad .... read on ›
