Visualizing Complex Datasets for a Museum Audience
Lara Young, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Robert Stein, IUPUI - Indiana University Purdue University at Indinanapolis, USA
http://www.ima-art.org
For the average museum website visitor, museums could accept the challenge of providing a more engaging, intuitive way of navigating through collection databases than by simply having users enter search terms and receive in return a standard search results page.
Museums are asking themselves, "How can we reach audience and provide an engaging experience that translates to increased web traffic, memberships, attendance, etc.?"
Museums might explore possibilities of giving visitors (virtual and otherwise) visual access to complex datasets they can manipulate. Demonstrate the following interesting data visualizations:
- NewsMap shows news stories in relatively larger sizes based on frequency of occurrences in publications tracked by Google News Aggregator. Could also be used by museums to show visitor patterns as they move through the galleries; most-viewed objects in the collections database, etc.
- BabyNameVoyager shows changes in name popularity over time (decades). This type of interface could also show patterns across collections (how many works in a museum's collection by medium, subject matter, etc. reveals proclivities, possibly strengths and weaknesses of collections)
- ThinkMap/Intaglio associative visual interface that shows how data are interconnected in IMA's permanent collection; Intaglio allows users to add collection data, documents, images, discussions and links to a project website that can be shared with others.
- LivePlasma shows associative data plus allows you to buy stuff from Amazon.com connects e-commerce with powerful data visualization; perhaps compelling new model for museums, to show related merchandise that can be added to a shopping cart when users find a work of art they like.
Encourage sharing of other interesting data visualization sites; brainstorm relevance to museum collections.
Bibliography
www.liveplasma.com site that allows you to check out associative relationships between your favorite musicians and buy related products from Amazon.com and email any map to a friend
Tufte, Edward, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press; 2nd edition (May, 2001)
Tufte, Edward, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press (May, 1990)
Tufte, Edward, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Graphics Press (February, 1997)
Wattenberg, Martin, http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html the Baby Name Wizard
Wattenberg, Martin, http://www.bewitched.com/art.html site exploring the works of Martin Wattenberg, including art, research and a bio
Weskamp, Marcos, http://www.marumushi.com/ explore many works, both data visualization and flash graphics.
Demonstration: Demonstrations [Close-Up]
Keywords: data visualization, museum collections
