Periscopic Now

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 ›

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.

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

We’ve partnered with Healthymagination to develop a tool that aggregates Tweets about a long-standing public health issue: breast cancer.

Twitter is a remarkable tool for enhancing social consciousness. However, Tweets are often limited to Tweeters’ network, just a sliver of the social media community. Through the aggregation of tweets, this project expands the scope of public awareness exponentially.

We’ve made it possible for visitors to insert themselves in an international conversation. Analyzing top words focuses the visitor’s attention on the specific topics that are dominating the discussion. Visitors can also explore the most commonly Tweeted news stories and track the Tweeters .... read on ›

We are currently looking for a Jr. Front-end Developer to join our happy team. 2+ years experience with both Flash (ActionScript 3) and HTML5 is preferred. A formal computer science education is ideal, but a strong penchant for efficient and elegant OO code is also okay.

The perfect candidate will be meticulous, detail oriented, and must possess creative and adaptive thinking skills. XML, PHP, MySQL, math/physics, creative background, or any other language or special talent score big bonus points. A passion for dealing with data, making sense of large amounts of disparate information, or statistical analysis would be lovely. Some .... read on ›

The deadline for WikiViz 2011 – a competition organized by WikiSym and the Wikimedia Foundation to visualize WIkipedia’s impact with open data – has been extended!

The WikiSym committee is glad to announce that the deadline has been extended to August 28 2011.

The 3 finalists will have travel costs covered for the awarding ceremony at WikiSym 2011 in Mountain View, CA (3-5 October 2011) and their work showcased at the conference, featured in our partners’ dataviz outlets (FlowingData, Information Aesthetics, Periscopic, Visualizing.org ) and published by El Mundo – the largest digital newspaper by readership in Spanish.

More here:

http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/wikiviz:presentation

read on ›

This past week I attended and presented at the inaugural O’Reilly Strata conference. My session was entitled: “Small is the New Big: Lessons in Visual Economy.” I had a great time at the conference and met a bunch of smart and interesting people.

In addition to posting my slides, a number of attendees asked for the sources of the images I used. Someone also asked if I could list the tools that were used to create each. While I don’t know all the tools that were used, I listed them when I could. All of this information is listed .... read on ›

The VAST Challenge is a data visualization contest that occurs every year as part of the IEEE VisWeek Conference. This year’s challenge dealt with three datasets: illegal arms trading, hospitalization records, and gene mutation. We chose to address hospitalization records and visualizing the spread of a pandemic.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the work was cleaning up and organizing the data. Records from disparate entities tend to have little resemblance to one another. Unfortunately, this means that analysis of data across these entities is time consuming, if feasible at all.

We looked at ways to enable early detection of epidemics and .... read on ›