Irrational and transcendental (or, An infographic solution in search of a problem)

  Pi 
  Originally uploaded by [P!]Wack.

Sometimes someone does something that makes no kind of sense, but you love them for doing it. (Usually we call that thing "art.") A fellow who goes by the handle [P!]Wack on Flickr posted a visualization of all the digits of pi (after the decimal point). Each pixel represents one digit, and is colored accordingly (see the key on the right).

The result looks like, well, static. And it has no value as an infographic because (1) each horizontal row is 100 pixels wide, which is a purely arbitrary number, and (2) each digit is assigned a purely arbitrary color.So looking at this tells us nothing about pi, except that it's pretty random.

But this technique could be adapted into an interesting infographic technique. Say each pixel represents a one hour period, and each row was 168 pixels long, representing a week. Then assign the digits as meaning 1,000's of page views for your web site, with 0 page views being pure black, 9,000 page views being pure white, and all the digits in between being shades of gray. Then stack 52 rows of pixels atop each other, meaning the 52 weeks of the last year. Presto, you can know see at a glance at what times during the week your site got the most traffic, and whether that time has changed or shifted over the last year.

You could do any variation on this, with the pixels representing a day or a month or a second or any unit of time. (Time is good for this because it is periodic, thus giving a reason to stack the rows-- unlike pi, which does not have any periodic interval.) The color of the pixel could represent sales or customers or temperature or any scalar value. Trends over time will be rendered eminently visible.

Every issue of Business 2.0 holds a lot of charts, tables, and infographics, so I'm always on the lookout for new techniques to display information. I hope I get to use this technique soon-- it should be pretty cool, though perhaps obscure.

(Title of this post taken from a comment on the Flickr pge by m0l0k0.)

UPDATE: My friend J points out that the row count actually does affect the visualization of pi. Here it is with a slight tweak:

Comments

[Saheli]

It would have been simple enough to make the pixels correspond to color meaningfully (just go with the fact that color has a frequency number associated).

It reminds me of the the math behind the JPG compression format--the idea being that the important information in a picture is often about boundaries and edges, which is exactly where classical ways of compressing information (relying on smooth periodicity) fail.