Edward Tufte on his White House appointment

April 3, 2010 to Infographics • Share on Twitter • Comments (1)

Edward Tufte was officially appointed to a White House advisory role a few weeks ago, but as Stephen pointed out, Tufte, along with other experts like Ben Shneiderman, have been providing input for the last year or so.

Tufte has a short chat (embedded below) with On the Media about what's been going on with Recovery.gov. The main point: report data like The New York Times.

The first thing I said about a year ago when I met with them for the first time is that their model should be a first-rate news website... Once we got the news metaphor and got the intense mapping, that’s halfway there. I wouldn't give it an A yet. There’s, you know, still a ways to go, and I know some of them, and I hope to, you know, find a few more.

Once Recovery.gov is further along, hopefully other government organizations follow suit, starting with Data.gov...or maybe Census...or the Bureau of Labor Statistics...or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Listen to the six-minute interview below.
Continue Reading

Location check-ins during South by Southwest

April 2, 2010 to Mapping • Share on Twitter • Comments (3)

Location-aware apps are the hot topic nowadays, and with all the tech-oriented people congregating at South by Southwest, there was a whole lot of checking-in to be done, especially with all the parties and get-togethers. Everyone wanted to know where everyone else was at.

SimpleGeo scraped the location stream, which was available on vicarious.ly, and mapped the check-ins over time.

I didn't spot any particularly interesting patterns other than the occasional bar-hopping, but still fun to watch. Looks like Foursquare leads, with Gowalla taking a big chunk too.

To be honest, I still feel kind of uneasy about the whole location-sharing thing. Anyone care to share their experience?

[Thanks @mrflip]

Map and report data with InstantAtlas

April 2, 2010 to Mapping, Software • Share on Twitter • Comments (12)

As you know, there's this big wave of transparency going on right now, and many organizations want to do more than just post a bunch of spreadsheets. They actually want to visualize it and share their data in a way that can be consumed by the general public. InstantAtlas aims to make that easy - without any code.
Continue Reading

Streamgraph code is available and open source

April 1, 2010 to Software, Statistical Visualization • Share on Twitter • Comments (10)

Some people love 'em and others hate 'em. Now you can play with streamgraphs (seen here and here) yourself, whatever side you might be on. Lee Byron has made the code available on Github, under a BSD license.

It's in Processing, and it's not plug-n-play like many of you are probably hoping for, but on a quick skim, the code does look very readable and shouldn't be too hard to grasp for those with a little bit of coding knowledge. I recommend reading Lee and Martin's streamgraph paper first though.

Discuss: Flowchart on drinkable water in the world

April 1, 2010 to Discussion • Share on Twitter • Comments (33)

March 22 was World Water Day, and TreeHugger posted this graphic on drinking water that is available in the world. The main point is that a very small percentage of water in the world is actually drinkable. It's definitely a story worth telling, but the graphic doesn't work at all. Even as a simple presentation of percentages (from UN-Water Statistics), it's confusing.

How can we improve this graphic to tell the story more clearly? Discuss.

[Thanks, Donald]