Time Lines
What’s the best way to show a time series? A static plot only goes so far, and it’s actually very bad for presenting long timelines. Fortunately, designers have come up with creative uses of rich platforms such as Flash for interactive interfaces. All of these interfaces enable “zooming” to capture the level of detail.
Google Analytics
The new Google Analytics platform uses elements from Google Finance. You can click and drag a “window” to focus on a period of interest.
British History Timeline
BBC recently released an interactive Flash program to explore British history from the Neolithic (nothing much to see here) ages to today. This is very useful to our history discussions we have often in the lab.
Google Timeline View
At a conference last week, Google releases a couple of new interfaces to its engine. The timeline view plots the frequency of occurrence of search keywords. (I was talking to a friend about nanotechnology last week, and used this feature to show him when the hype peaked.)
I’ve always been a fan of Sparklines:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msgid=0001OR&topicid=1
Some may not like him, but I think Tufte has some good ideas about presenting information.
Yes, I agree. You don’t necessarily have to agree with someone to listen to their viewpoint. Tufte is one of the authors I’m looking forward to reading when I get some time.
Infact, on my frontpage, the activity plot is a dynamically generated sparkline. It lets you see the overall trend in posting and commenting activity over the last 15 weeks.