Tag Archives: Visualization

The New York Times website is featuring an “interactive graphic” – visualizing the wealthiest Americans in history when wealth is measured as a percentage of the economy. Not only are these men ordered by wealth, but their lifespan is visualized vertically. The resulting graphic is both easy to use and understand.

I’m reminded of the Digital Campus podcast where Jeremy Boggs was a guest, discussing web design in academia. At one point in the episode Designed to Make You Think, Jeremy said:

As academics we’re already thinking about user interfaces. The way we present text in a book – the way we organize text in a book, if we want to move a sentence into the middle of a paragraph or if we want to move paragraphs around. The way we title paragraphs – this is all information architecture. This is all user interfaces. A book is a user interface.

The interactive graphic is effective is due of its user interface – predominately displaying the photos and bios of the businessmen, while also including supplementary information such as their life span, or a link to their obituary. It uses a simple and sexy user interface that links to further contextualizing information, and avoids overloading users with too much information. One of the shortcomings of the American Studies Tagline I created is that the visualization remains too cluttered — the approach of the NY Times is much more effective in that regard.

Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, and how can we begin to understand what precipitated those changes? Lastly, what are meaningful ways to convey that knowledge to students? An answer I’ve come up with is the American Studies Tagline – a timeline-based tag cloud that takes the essential American Studies texts in Lucy Maddox’s book and visualizes their contents.

The American Studies Tagline textually analyzes the articles in Maddox’s book and shows the most used words in a larger font and new terms in brighter colors. You can drag the slider to control the year – allowing you to clearly see what critics looked at, and how that has changed. I used open source software, also used by this incredible Presidential Speeches tagline which originally gave me this idea. The process was simple – I copied the contents of all these articles, dumped them into an XML file, and then used a cloud generator to visualize the text. This is something that historians and enthusiasts with limited knowledge of PHP and creating web pages can set up and use themselves.

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