my tryst with Info Viz....

over the past few months, I hv become keenly interested in Information visualization….had a course on it recently, and became hooked to it…

the first crash assignment was on visualizing the quarterly financial reports of IDFC…found it to be fascinating….but a huge struggle at the same time….majorly because my knowledge about finance was a big ZERO….to understand the jargon of the financial world, understand tht data, sieve through it ,extract the relevant info and make it comprehensible to the average person……….all of this in half a day was a task indeed!!.....Imagine visualizing….”Paid Up Equity Share Capital”…and u’ll know wht v were up against!!...

anyways, v came up with a Charles Minardish representation for the entire flow of the capital within IDFC…..right frm the Capital employed to Profit After Tax..

Our major assignment was sorting and categorizing through 1800 examples of Info Viz from books, magazines and the web…and come up with a classification scheme of our own…After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with a scheme of analyzing any Infographic along 5 axes:

Tools used

Methods used

Purpose of Representation

Type of Content

Way of Representation

The basic idea was to come up with a Designer’s guide to Infographics…and we tried to look at any Infographic lying along an n-dimensional space , having co-ordinates along each of these axes

Tools used

Color coding, Proximity, Typography, Size, Shape, Form, Layering, Symmetry

Methods Used

Level of Abstraction, Layering, Scaling, Choosing an axis- Temporal or Spatial

The tools and methods are generic, and go into the making of any Infographic, independent of the Content, Purpose or Way of Representation.

Purpose of Representation

Instruction- Images whose purpose is to instruct or teach; whether it be the details of an object or a process.

Comparision- Images whose purpose is Comparision; whether it be quantitative or qualitative data.

Revealation- Images where the data is revealed because of visualization. Ex. X-ray images.

Relationship- Images which visualize a (non hierarchial) relationship between 2 or more entities.

Type of Content

Quantitative- Content which is factual and quantitative in nature

Descriptive- Content which is describing an object or phenomena

Flow/Process- Content which has a temporal element to it i.e it flows along time. For ex. A story, a process etc.

Locational- Content which is locational in nature i.e changes with geographical location

All these assignments were done as a group work.