Data Visualization Idea - Data Pasture
Being a fan of Tufte, I'm always interested in Data Visualization. I feel one of the best presenters of data is nature. We see fractals in cauliflower, tree structures in trees and many other complex concepts presented in nature. Take a look at a couple of photos I pulled when I looked for "pasture" on Flickr.
When dealing with large datasets, if you look at pastures there is quite a bit of multivariate data happening. You've got different kinds of species at various stages of life in different groupings (or lack of grouping). That's a lot of data in one snapshot. And if you add time to the equation you have a good idea of the life-cycle of these items (wildflowers, grasses, etc.). Another item is when you add wind to a pasture the flowers and plants often bend giving the pasture a completely different look. This is what I call "visual wind" and it could be used to show the spread of events.
A useful example could be that of a country (the landscape) and its population (age, race, gender,etc as flowers or grasses of various kinds and height) and the spread of any kind of aliment over time. Someone like the CDC could use this to track and visualize the spread of disease (like avian flu) over time and see (via visual wind) how the events impact the overall data.
I'd like to try this out and if anyone has data that may fit the it, please use the contact me page.
Sean