The Poetics of Information Graphics

I was largely unaware how much information I take in in a single day. Information seems to pass straight through me without me even consciously registering it. I am desensitized to it, unable to take the time to appreciate the ways in which information flows through society as I have been bombarded by it my entire life.

This having been the case, my eyes are starting to open to the ways in which data and information can be presented. As I was cruising through Google, looking over page after page of information graphics, one stood out from the rest and immediately grabbed my attention. It was aesthetically pleasing while deeply intricate, I had to know more about it. It was contained within an article entitled, Infosthetics: the beauty of data visualization. For me, this visualizaition sums up the way in which my eyes have been opened to visual data not only for its aesthetic appeal but the data it is in fact visualizing. It is the visualization of poetry texts from an annual German literature festival held in 2006. As described in the article, each word corresponded to a numerical code by adding the alphabetical values of its letters together then mapped onto a position on a circle and marked by a red dot. The grey lines are the words which appear in the poem and the diameter of the circles is determined by the length of the poem ( http://pingmag.jp/2007/03/23/infosthetics-form-follows-data/ )
I got a bit lost in the logistics of the visualization but it was what and how this visualization did that intrigued me, I would have never thought it possible to visualize data contained within poems. After seeing this I started to think of all the things I could visualize that I could see while sitting at my desk. I looked at my DVD collection and thought about how I could show which DVD's I view the most by some sort of a heat scale, the ones I touch the most would be a hotter colour then ones I hardly touched. I could then place this heat scale into a circle, like the above visualization, which could depict an entire year, or maybe even a single month. This would allow me to visualize when I watch the DVD's and would show heavier traffic maybe around university holidays opposed to heavy study periods.
I am gradually becoming more aware of ways in which information can be visualized, and, furthermore, what information can be visualized. It is not simply a form of conveying information, it is an expression of that information, a look into the way in which it flows and works with elements surrounding it. It is art.