Weblog data as art

There are days one feels like winning the lottery. I discovered Lattice Uncertainty Visualization. This may not sound too appealing to many, but there are some very neat ideas about the visualisation of uncertainty (probabilities) in large data sets, particularly the use of various visualisation techniques for emphasis.

Something else I was searching for is a "reasonable" visualisation of events that occur over time. As it is, events happen over time all the time, but how to visualise them is not always that trivial. An example is the rate of blogging. Plotting a simple histogram of the number of posts per day is rather boring and difficult to interprete. And, for most of us, it would generate a rather silly visualisation of blogging (in)frequently.

An idea is to draw a dotted line for each post. Given that dotted lines contain white space, this also accommodates multiple posts a day (for the heavy bloggers among us; by filling some of the white dots). An example is given in the background of the image below. The foreground (see also a previous post) depicts self-linking (top) and linking to others (bottom).