I discovered an interesting OF project on Vimeo called Plinko Poetry. The project is a unique combination of data visualization, interactive display, gamification, and randomization. It displays real-time news headlines as running streams of text that a viewer can use to gain an overview of what is currently going on in the world. They can also choose to initiate the Plinko interaction, which will take a word from each currently displayed headlines and stitch them together into a new, ‘poetic’ headline. What I like about this project is that it allows the user to directly interactive with the data they are viewing to potential gain a new perspective on the data. The introduction of the randomness could be interpreted as a type of exploration of the data that provides this new perspective.

I think the ofxTimeline plugin could be of a lot of use for creating time-based data visualizations. I am interested in exploring visualization techniques for explaining the Jewish concept of time and I think that using this plugin, I could experiment with different ways to visualize movement through time.