The first visualization from Visual Complexity.com that caught my eye is titled “iPod Ecosystem.”
It got my attention because it reminds me of my older sister’s stories about how she used to download and listen to music before Apple’s giant leap forward into shaping the music industry and song consumption. Being born in 1998, I was always accustomed to Apple’s huge presence and popularity in the music market.
The two images juxtaposed against each other tell the story of the iPod’s transition into a mass market product quite nicely. The first image depicts the initial business players in the days of 2001 – we see how sparse and limited Apple’s network connections were at the start. The bottom image depicts the rampant market growth that resulted just three years later – the image shows how more diverse and full the iPod ecosystem business connections had become.
This other visualization, “visual i/zer”, lets users search for a song and see how different lyrics intersect with each other.
The user can do this by simply choosing and clicking on any keyword in a lyric to see how it connects with other lyrics using that same keyword. It caught my attention because I think it is a good demonstration of how “iPod Ecosystem” in contrast fails to be engaging.
Although “iPod’s Ecosystem” is insightful, it leaves me wanting more. The lack of interactivity is a huge letdown as I would naturally want to click on the iPod’s connections to see specifically what each relationship in the ecosystem provides as a service or technology – similar to how “visual i/zer” works in dynamically showing the lyrical ecosystem.
The contrast between “iPod’s Environment” and “visual i/zer” highlights differences between static and dynamic visualization. It also proves Stéfan Sinclair, Stan Ruecker, and Milena Radzikowska points on how interactive visualizations are objectively superior to static visualizations.
“Interactive visualizations, on the other hand, aim to explore available information, often as part of a process that is both sequential and iterative. That is, some steps come before others, but the researcher may revisit previous steps at a later stage and make different choices, informed by the outcomes produced in the interim. In a pie chart, by contrast, a static, synchronic object, the visual subdivision of the whole into parts can be useful, but the format does not readily lend itself to experimentation.”
The static connections depicted in “iPod’s Environment” are fine, but do not offer users the ability to explore different parts of the network, like “visual i/zer” allows. The iterative feature of “visual i/zer” really hooked me in, and made me immediately feel that “iPod’s Environment” was flat in the info it offered in comparison.
My favorite visualization from the DH Sample Book was the one we looked over in class, the “Map of Early Modern London.” This one is intriguing because of its ability to show such a vast amount of information in an easy-to-use way. Users can view the map through different perspectives by choosing the “locations by category” tool. Bridges, churches, neighborhoods, etc. can be found and highlighted simply by clicking on them, giving users a lot of power and variety with their research options. The format of its interactive user interface lets researchers explore freely and therefore draw their own conclusions about early London. Like “visual i/zer”, the “Map of Early Modern London” reflects the best kind of visualization tools that our readings this week discuss.
