What’s the Point?
So many new media artists and theorists are into making Data Visualizations, but I honestly think they should be re-classified as “abstract data visualizations” where appropriate. Check out this BuzzTracker. From the website: “Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.” Basically, the data that is visualized is obvious, as it is the largest cities that produce news and have news bureaus, and secondly, what does this reductive imagery actually tell us about world events? The only thing of interest to me is how this type of map could map to the movie War Games and possible thermonuclear scenario charts.
Anyhow, I dream of a day where visualizations help discover new information and relationships and not abstracted wallpaper’ification.
On another note, both of the projects I talk about above only use Google News anyhow. Man, some new players are needed in the search game. Google is M$ 2, mark my words in 10-15 years.
You know, I guess I should also provide a solution as to how to remake this type of project so that it regains functionality. Like if one could zoom in and out of the data and actually discover links on the map. I find Chicago Crime way more interesting and variable. And, its quite useful to discovering trends in Chi-town crime.
Now I’m heading back to Tufte’s school of reductive logic and mapmaking.
