It’s time for a reader discussion, open thread, etc. Today’s question is:
What are your favorite data visualizations in recent memory?
It can be something I’ve posted or it can be something I missed. To get your memory going, you might want to go through the archives. Are there any visualizations that made you stop and go wow?
I’ve been really impressed by the somewhat unconventional network diagrams done by The Arbitrarian, like http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/plotting-the-colors/ (colors), http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/dimesworth-of-difference/ (politics), and http://arbitrarian.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/nba-similarity-networks/ (basketball).
Hans Rosling… no question.
Pity his technology has disappeared into the Google Borg!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
Definitely this one about Manny’s quest for 500 homers!
http://flowingdata.com/2008/05/16/tracking-manny-ramirezs-hunt-for-500-homers/
The Flickr galaxy awesome, showing a great user interface and a glimpse of 3d on the web…
http://flowingdata.com/2008/05/29/flickr-tags-and-pictures-as-a-universe-tag-galaxy/
and I’m also a big fan of the “Life of the Cell” video:
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/118/
I’m a big fan of the Baby Name Voyager:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
simple, attractive, interactive, informative, elegant
@Chris: that’s some sexy scientific visualization! i think it belongs in a scifi movie.
thanks for participating, everyone. i guess i’ll chime in with one my recent favorites – harris and kamvar:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/02/29/hope-floats-in-online-dating-i-want-you-to-want-me-by-harris-and-kamvar/
Nice use of Google Chart API: xefer twitter charts
May be down or slow due to twitter flakiness, the output can be seen here, at my blog
The best I’ve seen in recent years:
http://www.venganza.org/piratesarecool4.gif
@Tim: haha, lovely. my suspicions have been confirmed.
I’m really liking http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html right now.
@Tom – That one is pure awesome.
I also liked this one a lot. http://leebyron.com/what/daylight/
Does anyone know the technology Hans Rosling used to create his time movie in his talk on world health, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 ?
@Chris Hane: At least part of the visualization is GapMinder/trendalyzer, which is available from Google:
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
Chris M is right. Here’s the link to the actual GapMinder-esque visualization:
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/motionchart.html
There’s a straightforward example that shows you how to use the API. I think it links up with Google Docs.