Carl V. Lewis

A quick refresher from my data visualization professor here at Columbia a couple of weeks ago reminded me why I was forced to spend all those grueling hours calculating standard deviation back in high school. See, when you’re using a data set to tell a story, the first step is to understand what that data [...]

With the Pulitzer Price announcements coming up later this afternoon, you’d think I’d be writing about whose up for the “Best Deadline Reporting” or “Best Public Service Journalism” prizes. But instead I want to talk about a different media award doled out during the past week: BostonGlobe.com’s designation as the “world’s best designed website” by [...]

A close look at the numbers shows that, assuming the company’s ad rates and inventory held steady, BusinessInsider.com nearly doubled its annual revenue in 2011 to about $8.5 million.

Take a look at this fascinating visualization of U.S. senate agreement groups made by Ph.D. student Adrian Friggeri. Using a complex agreement algorithim based upon data from GovTrack.us, the visualization displays how much all 100 senators of each U.S. Congress during the last 15 years have crossed the aisle –– or stuck to party lines –– [...]

Good aesthetics are more than just fluff when it comes to design. They are a core part of a product’s functionality. Such is the argument Donald A. Norman makes in his insightful 2005 book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. For Norman, attractive things work better by boosting the mood of the [...]

Interactive designer Don Saffer artfully captures both the practical and the theoretical aspects of his profession in his 2006 book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications for Clever Devices. From its title, Saffer’s book may sound like a simple “how-to” guide to creating web apps with interactivity. Yet while it is certainly that to an extent, [...]

In his brief two-page paper “Bubble Trees: The Visualization of Hierarchical Structure,” Richard Boardman proposes a new type of interactive presentation of hierarchical data that he calls the bubble tree. To bolster his argument, Boardman points out the difficulties inherent in the traditional “tree” structure, which suffers from the “breadth versus depth” problem by leading to information overload and [...]

When trying to reach a mass audience, what’s the best platform to share your content? Well, the obvious answer is as many places as you can. But according to a post by bitly analyzing traffic patterns, links shared on YouTube have a lifespan of 7.3 hours, compared to 2.8 hours on Twitter and 3.4 hours [...]

In keeping with our recent weekly reading about the growing ‘gamification‘ of data, I wanted to focus my critique this week on a map-styled data-driven game made my a group of researchers at Rutgers University called Salubrious Nation. The game attempts to engage users more deeply with public health data by luring them in with an [...]