I feel like I’ve been seeing and writing a lot about artistic visualization lately. Maybe it’s because summer’s ending and all the designers are finishing up their side projects. I dunno. In any case, Brendan Dawes provides you with a way to explore the news by doodling and scribbling. The piece is called DoodleBuzz. Type in a search term and then start doodling. News results (via the Daylife API) shoot off whatever path you draw.
DoodleBuzz spawned from Brendan’s desire to browse the news in a way that was completely different from the usual top-down scrolling we’re used to seeing on the Web:
DoodleBuzz was born out of an idea to create an entirely new way of exploring information – one that allows for a kind of “quiet chaos” that gives people the opportunity to explore unthought of paths and connections along their news gathering journey. You may start at Iraq but end up finishing on Britney, whilst taking in The Catholic Church, Global Warming and 50 Cent.
I don’t know about you, but the “quiet chaos” gave me a small headache. What do you think? Go try it and let us know what you think in the comments.
[via Data Mining]
This gives some pretty results, if indeed a bit chaotic :P
Along the lines of “non-linear” news visualization, there’s also this quite colorful treemap view, based on Google News: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/
(Not sure if it was mentionned before on FlowingData)
The balance between form and function is a delicate one. I’m not so sure “function” was preserved here. It’s definitely interesting, though.
We tried something like this with a tag cloud.
Check it out: http://www.cognocys.com/prospector/news.html