5 Apr 2012

Cinderella’s Magic Mirror, an Experiment on Online Animated Data Visualization by Xiaoqian Wu

Every aspect of the modern society is filled with massive data. With the high development of technology, it’s now possible for people to catch and store these pieces of precious information. But most of the time, such large amount of data is hard to understand and analyze, that’s why we also need visual design to help the public to access to the content of data.

Data visualization is the study of how to communicate information in a clear and effective way by graphic methods(Fry+Oram, 2007). Traditional attempts do great jobs in visualizing the data through graph drawings. But as the fact that data is always with rapid change and many dimensions, these static display are not enough for people to take full advantage of data. We need dynamic and animated ways to effectively visualize data. Processing, which is the creation of Ben Fry, provides us the possibility to present data with its attributes of time and dimensions.

My project aims at creating an online animated data visualization system, which is based on female style preference and the story context of Cinderella. If the content is thought of as a story behind the data, animated visualization could tell the story freely with creativity and existent art styles. Online system encourage convenient accessing and real time renewing of the data. With this experimental project, I hope to find some interesting and efficient way to visualize the data, which also means to achieve better communication with information so that we could deeper discover the society and human life.

Reference:

Ben Fry and Andy Oram (ed.) (2007) Visualizing Data. United States of America, O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Matt Woolman (2002) Digital Information Graphics. London, Thames & Hudson Ltd.



See Cindy's blog here

No comments:

Post a Comment