I created a new category for this blog: "Visual". I am going to keep here links to interesting way of representing information in a visual form. If you have links to share, please share. :-)

1. Tom Van Vleck's Memory Box

A personal history represented as a shelf with lots of stuff on it. You can click on each item and read a story behind it. An intelligent and creative way to organize your junk. :-)

2. Chernoff Faces

First I learnt about this idea from my boyfriend, and started to respect him twice as much since then. :-) This is the most interesting idea about information visualization I know so far.

Some quotes:

A way to display n variables on a two-dimensional surface. For instance, let x be eyebrow slant, y be eye size, z be nose length, etc. The above figures show faces produced using 10 characteristics--head eccentricity, eye size, eye spacing, eye eccentricity, pupil size, eyebrow slant, nose size, mouth shape, mouth size, and mouth opening)--each assigned one of 10 possible values

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Chernoff faces in action: Java applet.

Chernoff faces are used to illustrate trends in multidimensional data. They are especially effective at doing this because they relate the data to facial features, something which we are used to differentiating between Chernoff faces enable trends in data to be easily identified. However in order to make use of Chernoff faces the values which the features represent must be clearly shown in addition to the plot itself. While Chernoff faces provide an effective way of analysing trends in multidimensional data, they do not contain any information on the actual values which are plotted.

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