Looking Outwards 7: Information Visualization – Stefanie Posavec

Stefanie Posavec is an artist and designer experimenting and researching ways to visualize and communicate computational data to all ages and audiences. What I like and find most special about Stefanie’s work is that it is very colorful, fun, and visually appealing. Usually when I think of computational data, I don’t necessarily imagine something animated, cartoon-like, or age friendly. Stefanie’s visualizations deliver themselves like artwork in a children’s book.
In her work, “Drawing the Dictionary,” Stefanie responds to a theme of collections including parts of speech, syllables, first letter of the words, and alphabet. The words in the collection are specifically the 1000 most frequently used words. And used 1000 different colored index cards for each word. The words paper colors were organized by part of speech, background shape by syllables, placement by how frequently they are used, pattern by part of speech, and the pen color by first letter in word.
In her work, “Writing without words,” Stefanie visually showcased text in order to highlight the similarities and differences in writing styles when comparing different authors. She wanted to create a data visualization that was straight forward and one with a subject that was emotionally connecting to humans. To create this, she focused on a book called “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac and its themes. She did not want to use expressive typography or imagery but rather a subjective representation of information. She wanted the graphics to be quantifiable. She gathered data related to the english language structure.She wanted to visualize the novel as a living element full of energy and thus the novel is split into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words like a plant structure. Shorter sentences mean a choppy text and stiff writing style while longer sentences mean they are more free and leisurely. She gathered all data by hand and used math and a calculator to find final sums. Finally she used a computer graphics program instead of a data information one to watch the data generate bit by bit.

Sources:

http://www.stefanieposavec.com/work