Visualizing Complexity

How can you turn dry statistics into attractive and informative graphs? How can you present complex data sets in an easily understandable way? How can you create narrative diagrams from unstructured data? This handbook of information design answers these questions. Nicole Lachenmeier and Darjan Hil condense their extensive professional experience into an illustrated guide that offers a modular design system comprised of 80 elements. Their systematic design methodology makes it possible for anyone to visualize complex data attractively and using different perspectives. At the intersection of design, journalism, communication and data science, Visualizing Complexity opens up new ways of working with abstract data and invites readers to try their hands at information design.

Manuel Lima's smash hit Visual Complexity is now available in paperback. This groundbreaking 2011 book—the first to combine a thorough history of information visualization with a detailed look at today's most innovative applications—clearly illustrates why making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges in twenty-first-century design. From diagramming networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of informationvisualization by the field's leading practitioners.

This paper considers several distinct mathematical and computational tools, namely complexity, dimensionality-reduction, clustering, and visualization techniques, for characterizing music. Digital representations of musical works of four artists are analyzed by means of distinct indices and visualized using the multidimensional scaling technique. The results are then correlated with the artists’ musical production. The patterns found in the data demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for assessing the complexity of musical information.

2CO COmmunicating COmplexity is the international design conference aiming at exploring languages, approaches and technologies to respond to the emerging need for making complex information accessible throught design. 2CO’s first edition (25-26 October 2013, Alghero, Italy) has gathered an international community of professionals and scholars active in this area to share experiences, points of views and methodologies, focusing on three main areas of interest: informative-animation, interactive data visualization, info-graphics. This volume collects their contributions in the three conference categories: full papers, posters and ‘junior track’ special session. Generated by a consortium of European Universities that in 2011 started collaborating on the InformAnimation project, and by fellow Universities active in visual design teaching and research, COmmunicating COmplexity aims at becoming an international reference point for research and education in the area of communicating complexity through new media.

This book presents leading-edge research on artificial life, cellular automata, chaos theory, cognition, complexity theory, synchronisation, fractals, genetic algorithms, information systems, metaphors, neural networks, non-linear dynamics, parallel computation and synergetics. The unifying feature of this research is the tie to chaos and complexity.

This book focuses on marketing graphics, figures, and visual artifacts discussed in marketing theory in order to explain and discuss marketing concepts visually, and open a door to future predictions of the evolution of such marketing concepts. Marketing concepts are, by nature, abstract and there is a need for approaches that provide a clear picture of such concepts, along with concrete and hands-on knowledge tools to students, scholars, and practitioners. Furthermore, the recent rising importance and popularity of digital marketing tools and marketing metrics make visualization of such important marketing phenomena possible. Visualizing or concretizing of marketing data is more important than ever as the usage and presentation of such enormous amounts of data requires visual representation. Whereas the first edition focused on traditional marketing elements, namely the 4Ps or marketing mix elements, this edition includes a new section focusing on digital marketing, which introduces the 4Cs, defined as Connectivity, Content, Community and Commitment. Consequently, this edition provides a broader view of marketing concepts by also proposing a new conceptualization to today’s dynamically changing digital marketing value creation tools. As a result, this book develops a new foundation of digital marketing and provides an alternative way of discussing and explaining marketing concepts, old and new, with visual representations.

The rise of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the second half of the 20th century became the dominant force in economics. Its rise accelerates in the first 15 years of this century at an astonishing speed. The world of ICT right now is in the process of cosmic inflation. In the early universe, quantum fluctuations in a microscopic inflationary agile region became the seed for growing structures in the universe of galactic nebula, galaxies and stars, making the universe transparent. This phenomenon, familiar to physicist and cosmologists, happens right now to ICT. The current observation is that ''things'' of the physical world become intelligent, receive IP addresses and connect to the Internet. The possibilities to create new ICT-based products seem unlimited; however, sponsors must fuel the inflation. Complexity was already an issue when developing software in the early days of ICT. Software development is often done in projects that turn out to be exploratory in the sense that they aim at translating human voices, uttering requirements, into a machine-readable language. Requirements for the software to be build are usually not known at the beginning; the project must uncover them. Developing software without knowing the outcome in advance is a complex undertaking. Predicting the outcome of software projects by proven methods of civil engineering did not work out well. Now, new levels of complexity arise with ICT. Agile approaches are appropriate for software development; however, predicting the outcome of projects still is difficult. New techniques must manage the growing levels of complexity within ICT. Fortunately, mathematics has provided these new techniques. They rely on transfer functions and Eigenwert theory. Its usefulness already has been proven in major search engines of this century. However, this is not the end of the story. This books makes the mathematics of Lean Six Sigma transfer functions available to ICT practitioners. It provides the basic theory, explained with many examples, and even more suggestions, how Six Sigma Transfer Functions help with complex problems.

Maps capture data expressing the economic complexity of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe, offering current economic measures and as well as a guide to achieving prosperity Why do some countries grow and others do not? The authors of The Atlas of Economic Complexity offer readers an explanation based on "Economic Complexity," a measure of a society's productive knowledge. Prosperous societies are those that have the knowledge to make a larger variety of more complex products. The Atlas of Economic Complexity attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge countries hold and how they can move to accumulate more of it by making more complex products. Through the graphical representation of the "Product Space," the authors are able to identify each country's "adjacent possible," or potential new products, making it easier to find paths to economic diversification and growth. In addition, they argue that a country's economic complexity and its position in the product space are better predictors of economic growth than many other well-known development indicators, including measures of competitiveness, governance, finance, and schooling. Using innovative visualizations, the book locates each country in the product space, provides complexity and growth potential rankings for 128 countries, and offers individual country pages with detailed information about a country's current capabilities and its diversification options. The maps and visualizations included in the Atlas can be used to find more viable paths to greater productive knowledge and prosperity.