Posts tagged ‘visualisation’
The rise of Wordle
We’ve been having a debate in the office about the merits of Wordle. These are Russ’ thoughts.
Russ Wilson writes:
Wordle, word clouds, Tagxedo: all online apps for taking a load of data in the form of words and presenting it in a design friendly way. As a lover of language I’m all for anything that encourages people to explore words, think about how and why they’ve been used and analyse their meanings. However I’m not really sure that any of these tools do this.
I have two main issues with Wordles, and they’re exemplified in the wordle above, based on David Cameron’s coalition speech. First, they remove the word from its immediate context. Take the word interest, represented as one of the more frequently occurring words. But it could equally indicate curiosity and engagement or interest payments. The Wordle doesn’t help; it only tells us the word occurred often in the speech. Similarly, coalition also figures prominently. But it doesn’t help with context. We can’t tell, for example, whether they said ‘this is a coalition’ or ‘this is not a coalition’!
The second issue is that frequency is being proposed as an indicator of importance, but that’s not how we actually interpret speech. Imagine a Wordle which captures responses to a question such as ‘What do you think of the coalition?’ One person might say the new government is ‘absolutely the most important and exciting change in politics in living memory’; others might respond that it is ‘quite troubling’, ‘not very troubling’ or even ‘not troubling’? The Wordle would look, well, troubling:
Frequency of use is simply that – frequency of use.
Wordles do look good. But they become dangerous when presented as meaningful analysis. They don’t tell the right story, and worse, they are also capable of telling a completely different story altogether. Yet the mainstream media are happy to present them as semi-serious analysis: The Guardian says that from its Wordles for Nick Clegg and David Cameron’s acceptance speeches ‘you can get a good idea of the two leaders’ use of language – and which words were important to them’. As a linguist I know there are many ways to explore their language use, but I don’t think I would include a Wordle as a method of analysis or of display. Their visual appeal gives them more credence than they deserve.
As a final test, here is a Wordle of this post – do you think it reflects the views I’ve expressed above?
Keeping Track
Eloise Keightley writes:
The industry for personal informatics is certainly one to watch. There’s even been talk of a ‘movement’ and unsurprisingly, the iPhone has spawned a host of personal informatics applications. These applications are tantamount to an omphaloskeptics’s dream: pretty much any variable of life can be tracked to the most granular degree. Users of personal informatics sites can log everything from vegetables consumed and number of migraines suffered to variations in mood and their feelings about particular places.
Perhaps evidence that consumers are seeking certainty in these uncertain times, the sheer number and variety of personal informatics applications suggests not only a rising interest in self-analysis (or an increasingly narcissistic society) but a desire for more control over one’s personal life. For starters, these tools help you to learn from the past and plan for the future – if you ate too many calories this week, you know exactly how many to remove from your diet next week. However, much of the allure of personal informatics lies in the visualisations these sites can produce with the raw data. Sites such as your.flowingdata.com allow users to create custom visualisation pages for what they’re most interested in and encourage you to ‘play’ with the data.
In theory, brands could have an enormous pool of data at their disposal should these tools become mainstream enough to attract sufficient users. While many personal data tracking accounts monitor health and leisure habits, many others track brand usage, product usage and attitudes towards brands. Personal informatics could help brands spot emerging competitors faster and track whims and fads with more agility than conventional methods. However, criticism of social networking sites that have deployed their members’ data for commercial gain mean that brands need to tread carefully: an assumption that you own the data simply because it is publicly available is imprudent.
On the other hand, brands are beginning to wake up to the potential of incorporating personal informatics into their business propositions – most notably Nike, through its joint venture with Apple and a handful of health clubs to produce the Nike + iPod package. It’ll be interesting to see how others follow suit.
The above image comes from Mapmaker, a user of the Mycrocosm personal informatics website, and is reproduced here with thanks.
