Op-ed

Infrequent notes on projects, publishing and platforms

Irish Budget 2009: Visualizations & comparisons

The 2009 Budget was presented yesterday. Full coverage in the Irish Times, on RTE, in the Independent, etc. There is detail and analysis everywhere. But it's interesting to look at Brian Lenihan's budget presentation, in the form of his speech - and comparing it to Brian Cowen's budget statement from December 2007, using some simple visualizations.

Below are some interactive visualizations I built quickly using IBM's Many Eyes project, as presented at the Web 2.0 Expo last month in New York. Click on each image to use an interactive version of the visualization. You can customise word limits, make comparisons and search for keywords used in each speech (note: if you're viewing this within Facebook, these may not show for you, see my original post here).

Budget 2009: Brian Lenihan's Speech: Word Tree visualization (shows phrase branches - enter a phrase to see branching)

Budget 2009 Speech: Wordle representation (more instances = larger words; you can interact & select word limits)

Budget 2008 & 2009: Phrase comparison between the two speeches (more instances = larger words, again click to interact and compare single words, phrases, etc.)

Budget 2008: Brian Cowen's speech from December 2007: Wordle representation (to compare with the above)

Feel free to create your own better and more in-depth visualizations based on the budget - the data sets I used are already loaded to Many Eyes and freely available for you to manipulate.

Just launched 'The Node' for Oracle

Just launched 'The Node' project for Oracle at hello.iamtheno.de , to coincide with Oracle OpenWorld 2008. We worked with the Oracle EMEA marketing team (based in Dublin), with input from the OTN (Oracle Technology Network) and the Oracle Appslab guys. 
The project draws in RSS/XML content feeds from across the OTN and Oracle.com, then aggregates and visualizes related content through a tag-based interface. What we call a semi-semantic view. It gives a real sense of the depth of content Oracle has online and is designed to promote content discovery.
Oracle is doing some interesting collaborative and crowdsourcing work across the board. Oracle.com recently gave itself over completely to a crowdsourcing experiment, inviting anonymous ideas and suggestions from the community. OTN editor Justin Kestelyn has blogged the best ideas so far. The Appslab team are also doing some good work, notably Oracle Mix and OraTweet. 
Good project - some screenshots attached. We didn't get to visit the Oracle HQ as part of it though. Sad banana.

(download)

SuperVisualize Me

Currentlly working on a couple of interesting web projects involving visualisation. The clients in question have huge information repositories, but are not unlocking their full value.

Visual representations of data, and relationships, are a method of unlocking this value. Just look at election coverage to see how vast reams of data get tamed visually. Google Analytics is another obvious example.

The work of information artist Jonathan Harris has been inspirational. The excellent Flowing Data is a great resource. ReadWriteWeb has a collection of tools. Edward Tufte demands more than just a mention; he's like a Data Representation God.