Tim Churches wrote: > Tim Churches wrote: >> Courtesy of the Infosthetics blog, a very nice facetted browser using >> "elastic lists", in which metadata about the frequency of each category >> in a facet is conveyed by the size and shading of the item's background. >> Also, be sure to enable the sparklines to see a temporal dimension as >> well. All done in Flash, not Javascript, but there are some nice ideas >> there: http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/ > > Thinking more about this, the idea of making the area of the bar for > each category in a facet proportional to its conditional univariate > frequency, as illustrated in the "elastic lists" demo above, is pretty > cute.
hmmm, linearly proportional seems like a really bad idea, since those facet values are going to be pretty much all power-law distributed. Logarithmically proportional, maybe. In laying out a faceted browser, reducing the amount of space facets move away from the items is already a big challenge... giving more space to the items just to indicate their size (which is already indicated by the number count) could be just redundant. That said, some people relate to visual semantics (like shape color size) better than to typographic value, so it might be worth exploring. My problem with size-based listings (say, tagcoulds) is that my eye gets attracted by the two/three big players and the rest becomes much harder to parse out. Also there is already a discussion (at least between some of us) of whether or not it's useful to show all items in a facet (as the facet long tail is rarely selected when slicing and dicing at least until the facet values are less than ~10 total). Personally, I'm a big fan of size-ordered facet lists with a cutoff at the half size (you show the head of the tail until you cover at least half the items). David like alphabetical-ordered facet lists better. I wish we could do a usability study to prove which one is better (if at all!) ;-) > But I wonder if that idea can be extended to multivariate > frequencies, with shading based on the degree of variation from > expectation, as in mosaic displays (see > http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Papers/asa92.html for a good introduction) > - could that ever be a useful alternative interface for a facetted data > browser? > > Sparklines are also a very neat idea, and might be a useful addition to, > say, the thumbnails view in Exhibit, for time series of quantities > (although the x-axis of a sparkline does not have to be time) - see > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline and particularly > http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1 We have used sparklines before with great success and sexy appeal (see http://simile.mit.edu/gadget/), but I'm not sure that 'condensed timeline' overlapped with the facet value is that useful. For example, not all data has a time dimension to it and even if so, we have highly multidimensional data: which axis should you choose to show there? configurable? different one per facet? would that increase user confusion? how would that relate to the timeline view? (and an eventual future time series view?) Don't get me wrong, it's great to have such stimulating discussions and we very much suggest people to take exhibit and make derivatives to show potential innovations that we will then factor back in if the community finds them useful. So keep the brainstorming flowing! -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
