About Visual Gadgets

A month or two ago, I started exploring the use of a blog as a medium for drafting the materials of a possible online, access level undergraduate course on interactive media and computer game design: Digital Worlds: Interactive Media and Game Design uncourse blog experiment.

That experiment is ongoing, but now I also have to draft some materials for a 'chunk' of another course... here was the tease I drafted to give an overview of what I saw the chunk covering...

In this block, you will explore how pictures can tell stories. From simple bar charts and line graphs, to 2.5D animations for displaying data, from visual thinking tools to geotemporal mashups, you'll explore how visualisation techniques can be used to make sense of things as diverse as large socio-economic data sets and complicated ideas.

As I've got in to some sort of a routine with the Digital Worlds blog, and also accreted some useful comments through it and additional material around it, I thought I'd draft some of my visualisation material in public too...

To hopefully make the material useful in the year or two before it makes it into a published course(!?), I'm going to sketch out my ideas in the context of the Google Visualization API gadgets - hence the name of the blog.

So here goes...