Earlier this year, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to check out Jonathan Harris’s data visualization artwork piece, I Want You To Want Me. With I Want You To Want Me, Harris mines Craigslist’s personal ads and slices up the data by gender, age, match preference and self-description. To visualize the data, Harris presents to the viewer an open sky that gets flooded with balloons representing each person’s ad. You can touch the screen to interact with the balloons for more details or change filters, and the balloons react realistically. It’s a very beautiful work, and it warms my heart that a programmer’s work can be considered art.
There’s hope for me to get into the MoMa yet!
Harris’s other well-known work is We Feel Fine, is similar to I Want You To Want Me, but instead of personal ads, he mines blogs for the phrase “I feel” and analyzes the text to figure out what feeling the blog entry is expressing. He presents the data as little blobs that you can interact with. He even provides an API for you to use the data he collected.
Some other cool data visualization links:
- Your Facebook friend networks
- NY Times Visualization Lab
- Geolocated Twitter messages
- Roots. Trippy data visualization and auralization
- Datamob – “public data put to good use”
- Plotting NBA players based on playing styles