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• Thank You FlowingData Sponsors

  Posted Oct 22, 2009 to Announcements / Add your comment

  A BIG thank you to our sponsors. You keep FlowingData running smoothly, make it possible for projects like your.flowingdata and FlowingPrints to come alive, and most importantly, allow FlowingData to grow. We saw some 350k views this month and are quickly coming up on 25k RSS and email subscribers. Yikes.

  Xcelsius Present — Transform spreadsheets into professional, interactive presentations.

  NetCharts — Build business dashboards that turn data into actionable information with dynamic charts and graphs.

  InstantAtlas — Enables information analysts to create interactive maps to improve data visualization and enhance communication.

  Tableau Software — Data exploration and visual analytics for understanding databases and spreadsheets that makes data analysis easy and fun.

  IDV Solutions — Create interactive, map-based, enterprise mashups in SharePoint.

  Email me at nathan [at] flowingdata [dot] com if you'd like to sponsor FlowingData, and I'll get back to you with the details.

• Target Store Openings Since the First in 1962 – Data Now Available

  Posted Oct 22, 2009 to Data Sources / 7 comments

  

  FlowingData readers who have been around for a while will remember I made a map early this year that showed the growth of Target stores across America. It starts with the first one in 1962 and then goes from there. It was a follow-up to the Walmart map, which I shared the code and data for.

  Anyways, I often still get emails about the Target data. I finally got around to asking if I could release it, and lucky for your the answer was yes. So here you are. Go wild.

  By the way, if anyone has similar data for Starbucks, let me know. There's gotta be at least one Starbucks analyst who reads this blog. Maybe?

  [Thanks, Cole]

• Open Thread: What the **** is Visualization Anyways?

  Posted Oct 21, 2009 to Discussion, Visualization / 19 comments

  I think ever since visualization got started, people have been asking this question.

  What is visualization?

  Some... okay, many describe it as purely an analytical tool. Others (i.e. me) are a little more liberal with their use of the term while the rest are somewhere in between. Some insist that the stuff we see on information aesthetics belong in an entirely different category and that that stuff isn't visualization at all.

  As art, science, design, statistics, computer science, etc. start to melt together, the line between what is and isn't visualization grows more blurry.

  What do you think? Is visualization only analytical? Can visualization be art? Are the infographics that frequent the front page of Digg visualization or are they just pretty pictures? Can visualization be just a pretty picture? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

• How Much Do CEOs Make in the United States?

  Posted Oct 20, 2009 to Infographics / 19 comments

  

  GOOD magazine's most recent transparency contest asked designers to focus their powers on showing CEO compensation in the United States.

  The above graphic, by Dee Adams, won top honors. Adams' graphic shows the eight CEOs with the highest compensations and the number of minimum wage earners that each respective CEO's compensation could have supported. Bruce Wasserstein of Lazard ltd. was the top earner at $133 million, or the annual salary of 8,866 minimum wage earners.

  Below are the two runners up by Amanda Buck and Thomas Edwards, respectively.

  

  

  Whether these salaries are justified, well, I'll leave that up to you to decide.

  Check out all the other entries here.

• When Twitter Says Good Morning Around the World

  Posted Oct 19, 2009 to Artistic Visualization / 15 comments

  

  Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, visualizes when people "wake up" on Twitter, or when they say good morning, rather. Here it is in its 3-d globe glory. It's called GoodMorning!. Notice the wave.

  Okay, wait, I know you're already furiously leaving or thinking about a comment on how absolutely useless and non-concrete this is - and Jer is the first to admit that - but there is obviously something to learn here.

  However, it's late, and I'm tired, so I'll leave that up to you. But off the top of my head, I'm thinking a more relevant subject like disease or need of help and color coding that's more meaningful. Your turn.

  [via datavisualization.ch]

• An Addiction to Charts and Graphs

  Posted Oct 16, 2009 to Miscellaneous Visualization / 6 comments

  Haha, Jason Segel is hilarious. In this episode of How I Met Your Mother Segel's character Marshall has an interesting addiction that I think many FD readers can relate to:

  I need a chart.

  [Matthew Ericson via Economix]