‘inform: turning data into meaning’, curated by wired magazine editor thomas goetz, is the latest exhibition of the free online adobe museum of digital media

‘inform: turning data into meaning‘ is an exhibition on infographics and the quantification and visualization of data from the digital world. curated by thomas goetz, executive editor of wired magazine, the exhibition is the most recent addition to the adobe museum of digital media (AMDM), and represents the inaugural show of the online museum’s ‘curator in residence’ initiative.

the AMDM is an exclusively web-based gallery, accessible free of charge and focusing on how digital media influences culture and society. the ‘inform’ exhibition presents ten compelling visualizations– across the range of static, video, and interactive pieces– all explorable by visitors in greater detail. information about the project and text commentary by goetz are easily accessible via icons on each project page, from which users may also engage in discussion with other museumgoers in a comments section.

works include ‘317‘, a graphic visualization by carolina andreoli in which she charts the relationship she has with each of the 317 people she met between 1987 and 2009; ‘we feel fine‘, the iconic web-scraping visualization by jonathan harris and sep kamvar that offers and illustration and search for how the world is feeling based on searches of personal blogs for the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’; and ‘amsterdam SMS messages on new year’s eve’ by aaron koblin, an animation that tracks the number of text messages sent over the days leading up to and following january 1st, 2008.

‘amsterdam SMS messages on new year’s eve’ by aaron koblin, one of the works on exhibition in ‘inform: turning data into meaning’

infographics + data visualization at the adobe museum of digital media (AMDM) - 2 ‘we feel fine’ interface by jonathan harris and sep kamvar

infographics + data visualization at the adobe museum of digital media (AMDM) - 3 ‘inform: turning data into meaning’, curated by wired magazine editor thomas goetz, is the latest exhibition of the free online adobe museum of digital media above, ‘twitter reputations’ by kunal anand

infographics + data visualization at the adobe museum of digital media (AMDM) - 4 ‘skype visualization’ by onformative studio (cedric kiefer and julia laub)

exhibition curator thomas goetz:

‘for many of us, the digital world is where our lives take form. we quantify our friends on facebook, earn fans on flickr and count followers on twitter. our every action is logged and cookied and crunched. this world may be invisible, but it is demonstrably real. it is where ideas spread, communities emerge, passions flare, and news travels.

this exhibit celebrates a new generation of visual pioneers—part graphic designers, part statisticians, part artists— who have a faculty for turning data into meaning, often with beauty and urgency we don’t expect from data. […] strictly speaking, these are simply visual displays of quantitative information. but […] these visualizations don’t just tell us about our world, on- and off-line; they tell us about ourselves, through and through.‘

infographics + data visualization at the adobe museum of digital media (AMDM) - 5 exploring ‘we feel fine’ in the adobe museum of digital media gallery