Fine art holds a great deal of potential opportunity for smart data visualization installations that integrate with analog elements. Tim Schwartz's Command Center is an elegant example of this, combined with a serious message. Tim has written a very useful tool for data visualization -- a graphing interface for a dataset consisting of every word written in the New York Times since 1851. This huge set of data drives the Command Center by displaying the frequency of certain words (weapons, war and others) on old-fashioned analog gauges and the year on a red LED counter.
The content is a loop that starts in 1851 and progresses one year every few seconds. Over time viewers develop a sense of a slice of history as translated by the Times and Mr. Schwartz.
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