I’ve long been an admirer of London-based data artist, Stefanie Posavec. So, when I started working on the Information Is Beautiful book, she was the first person I sought out for collaboration. By happy coincidence she lived around the corner from me.
The result is the awesome (and controversial) Left vs Right concept map.
Now available as a limited edition poster!
Literary Organism
Stefanie’s personal work verges more into data art and is concerned with the unveiling of things unseen. ‘Literary Organism’ is an amazing visualisation of the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.
Here the lines divide into chapters, bloom into paragraphs, sprout sentences, and spread out into words. All are colour-coded according to the key themes.
The process involved intense mark-up of the original text.
And the creation of a series of awesome visualisations.
Take a look at them in high resolution. These small screens don’t really do the detail justice. [via Notcot]
Ok Go
I’m sure you’ve seen US rockband Ok Go’s amazing Mousetrap-esque video. Here, Stefanie teamed up with Microsoft research ecologist, Greg McInerny to create a visualisation design for the album cover. They worked from the text of the album namesake ‘The Influence of the Blue Ray Of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of The Sky‘ by General AJ Pleasonton.
Their works in progress sprang some nice side images based on the lyrical rhythm of the album.
Entangled Word Bank
Here Stefanie produced a visualisation of the evolution of the various editions of Darwin’s opus, The Origin Of Species. I loved the organic feel of the image, like specimens pressed under glass. And the number crunching of over a million words, again by Microsoft ecologist Greg McInerny (using statistical package ‘R’, nerds).
I actually wrote a piece about this in Wired UK. (Nepotism? Je?). So you can find out more there.
Each visual approach was generated from a different ‘seed’ of DNA code. This produced a entire species of organisms, from which the final one was chosen.
Lefts Vs Right
Stefanie did a beautiful job illustrating how political notions may percolate down from government, into society, families, individuals, beliefs and back around into institutions. This concept map has courted much controversy. Left vs Right is perhaps a old and limited way of perceiving the spectrum. But it’s mostly how it’s presented via the media – left wing vs. right wing, liberal vs. conservative, Labour vs Tory. And so maybe in our minds too…?
Get A Limited Edition poster
I love the Left vs Right. I think visualising concepts is one most exciting potentials of the information design movement. So I’m proud to announce that we’ve made a limited edition print of it.
We’ve got just 200 of the US version and 200 of the World version to sell – all numbered and signed by Stefanie Posavec and myself, David McCandless.
They’re printed on 300 gsm, FSC-certified art paper at A1 size (60 x 81 cm). (Translation: they’re gorgeous!).
You can find out more details on our Information Is Beautiful Big Cartel page. It has secure ordering.
25% of the profits will go to Ganet’s Adventure School, a children’s charity in Malawi.
You can also get some prints of Stefanie’s work here. Check out her site at itsbeenreal.co.uk
ALL THE LINKS:
:: Stefanie Posavec’s website
:: Left vs Right concept map
:: Buy a Left vs Right limited edition, signed print!
:: Stefanie Posavec Literary Organism in high resolution (via Notcot)
:: Microsoft research ecologist Greg McInerny’s homepage
:: OK Go album cover work-in-progress images
:: Ganet’s Adventure School in Malawi
:: Find prints of Stefanie’s work
11 Comments
Thanks for the intro to Stefanie’s work, it’s so beautiful!
I saw some of Stefanie’s work on display in the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield last year. It was the ‘On the road’ work in particular that sparked my interest in infographics in general.
Love the organic feel to the visualizations. How are they created?
Same question as Richards, the first image look a lot like graphviz neato output, but enhanced.
I love it.
Absolutely stunning work!
Thank you for this wonderful post. I’m an admirer of SP’s work and was planning to write this very post on my blog, but you beat me to the punch!
“Information is Beautiful” is a great resource. Keep up the good work.
Nice work.
Caveat: the information informing the graphic is pretty biased. A valuable lesson in how visualization can sometimes make biased information seem more palatable while exposing the bias in the first place.
The information feeding this particular poster is highly interpretive and comes from a set of studies that have been produced by people who fairly uniformly fit into one side of that equation. Guess which one. I’d be curious to know which side of the equation Steph falls into, but again, I think I can guess.
Being fairly down the middle, it doesn’t bother me much, but it’s important to note that this kind of information isn’t exactly “data” so much as subjective interpretation (for instance, Nurturing Child vs. Self Reliant Child isn’t quant, it’s a label someone gave certain behaviors, almost certainly based on a set of self-held emotional constructs).
The visual artifact itself, however, is wonderful.
The “bloom” visualiation does some wonderful optical illusion motion stuff when you’re looking at denser parts of the full-size one. I’m not sure if it’s intentional, or just a fluke of my monitor resolution, but it’s lovely.
Stefanie just did a series of graphics for our 2010 Bundle Report: How America spends, and I can’t say enough about her. In addition to being amazingly talented and creative, she’s just a delight to work with — responsible, nice, respectful of deadlines, all that boring stuff that can just transform a working relationship. I hope she gets hugely famous.
The link to the wired Entangled UK article includes a few extra characters that lead to a bad link error message.
is included in the hyperlink, but should not be. Savvy users will catch this, but as you probably know others may not.
Beautiful work… BUT not data. I would title the blog (just for that post): propaganda is beautiful.
I was particularly disturbed by how she represented right-handed families. Absurd!