Information Design Watch
March 14, 2012, 1:29 pm
Eulogy for a Dinosaur
By Henry Woodbury
The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica has ceased print publication:
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
Given the well-known collaborative editing model of Wikipedia, Gary Marchionini, the dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, makes an interesting claim about not only the competitive difference, but about the nature of knowledge itself:
The thing that you get from an encyclopedia is one of the best scholars in the world writing a description of that phenomenon or that object, but you’re still getting just one point of view. Anything worth discussing in life is worth getting more than one point of view.
Comments (0) | Filed under: Business, Scholarly Publishing, Technology
March 7, 2012, 3:42 pm
The Scientists Sketch
By Henry Woodbury
Data visualization consultant Lee De Cola has assembled a neat cross section of sketches by famous scientists. Here, for example, is a literal back-of-the-envelope sketch by Henri Poincaré:
Sadly, many of the images are small, or culled of context. Consider them a teaser. Galileo’s sketch of Saturn is a minor doodle compared to the visual storytelling found in this page from his notebook on Jupiter:
Comments (0) | Filed under: Art, Charts and Graphs, Diagrams, Illustration, Information Design, Maps, Scholarly Publishing, Visual Explanation
February 20, 2012, 2:18 pm
Logo Evolution, the Forecast
By Henry Woodbury
A few years ago we posted a history of technology company logos. Now, Stocklogos has taken a similar set of logos and created a future version of each. For fun. Here’s an example:
Comments (1) | Filed under: Branding, Design
February 14, 2012, 9:47 am
Big Data in the House
By Henry Woodbury
The New York Times Sunday Review highlights Big Data. Big Data is that rapidly backfilling reservoir of web analytics and real-world sensor data. It is also a million rivulets of meandering incident, logged at its portages and tracked by its jetsam. The projected revolution starts with the ability to find meaning from it all:
Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.
But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.
Unfortunately, the examples in the article are not inspiring. There is a difference between real scientific discovery and arbitrage opportunities and other than engineering-driven examples such as Google’s robot-driven cars, most of the focus is on arbitrage opportunities.
Case in point is the invocation of Moneyball. I am a big fan of baseball sabermetrics, and, among those paying attention, the work of Bill James and other analysts has revolutionized the way people evaluate baseball players. But this is work on the margins. It doesn’t trump the expression of true talent that anyone can spot, and it doesn’t void the enormous impact of chance. Hubris may be more dangerous than confusion:
Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”
Comments (2) | Filed under: Sports, Technology
February 7, 2012, 10:11 am
The Tube as Watershed
By Henry Woodbury
Cartographer Daniel Huffman has taken Harry Beck’s map of the London Underground and applied it to river systems. The results are beautiful and illuminating:
Huffman explains:
I wanted to create a series of maps that gives people a new way to look at rivers: a much more modern, urban type of portrayal. So I turned to the style of urban transit maps pioneered by Harry Beck in the 1930s for the London Underground. Straight lines, 45º angles, simple geometry. The result is more of an abstract network representation than you would find on most maps, but it’s also a lot more fun. The geography is intentionally distorted to clarify relationships. I think it helps translate the sort of visual language of nature into a more engineered one, putting the organic in more constructed terms. Not every line depicted is navigable, but all are important to the hydrological systems shown.
Part of a continuing series:
- A New (Old) Subway Map
- New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards
- Looking at the Real Underground
- The Tube as Template
- Update: The Tube as Template
(Via Greg Pliska, LearnedLeague.)
Comments (0) | Filed under: Art, Information Design, Maps
January 30, 2012, 10:49 am
“a tougher, more defined panther”
By Henry Woodbury
After 15+ years in the league, the NFL’s Carolina Panthers are changing their logo.
In a press release the team proclaims:
[The identity] has been designed to provide a more aggressive, contemporary look to the logo while making it more three-dimensional for ever-increasing digital use.
I’m not sure how three-dimensionality relates to digital use, other than the fact that all the other kids are doing it.
Will Brinson at CBS Sports has some design review fun:
…this cat’s a little less hairy — the whiskers are significantly reduced from the old version, and the eyebrows (Panthers have eyebrows right?) are reduced as well.
It’s a more streamlined cat and, frankly, a little more ferocious and realistic looking of an animal. The team’s calling it “a tougher, more defined panther” and that’s an accurate assessment.
The Panthers typeface is also different: it’s no longer written in 80′s hair-metal font. Or cat scratch font. Or whatever.
Click through to the Brinson article to see the old logo for comparison.