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?
Interactive: How Americans Get to Work
Relationship Status Geography
Chart of Cousins
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.