So I got to thinking, since I'm on this pie chart kick, "what would be the worst pie chart ever?" And I decided it would be a Venn diagram made with pie charts. I laughed to myself, imagining such a creation. Then I thought, somebody's probably done this. And indeed, there's an app for that.

At long last, the power of Venn diagrams and pie charts combine to turn the world of mathematics on its head! If you've ever felt the need to create Venn diagrams with pie charts, or wished your pie charts could overlap to provide even more informative data, then Venn Pie-agrams is the app for you!

I'll leave it at that.

I'm pretty sure I'm not in their target audience, but my main takeaway from this video is that now, with easel.ly, you don't need time, money, or skill to make quality infographics. And the prezi-like video seems fitting.

Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways, but I'm having trouble getting on board with these tools. Easel.ly, for example, provides themes, such as the one on the right. There's a guy in the middle with graphs around him and pointers coming out of his body. You get to edit however you want.

So in this case, you start with a complete visual and then work your way backwards to the data, which I'm not sure how you can edit other than manually changing the size of the graphs. (Working with the interface takes some patience at this stage in the application's life.) It's rare that good graphics are produced when you go this direction.

Instead, start with the data (or information) first and then build around that — don't try to fit the data (or information) into a space it wasn't meant for.

Or maybe there's a lot more in store that we can't see yet. Either way, right now, the application is rough at best.

While the goal is to build a toolkit that makes visualization easier and faster, the first release of the project is Dataset, a JavaScript library to setup the foundation of any good data graphic. If you've ever worked with data on the Web, you know there are a variety of (usually painful) steps you have to go through before you actually get to fun stuff. Dataset will help you with the data transformation and and management grunt work.

One of the most common patterns we've found while building JavaScript-based interactive content is the need to handle a variety of data sources such as JSON files, CSVs, remote APIs and Google Spreadsheets. Dataset simplifies this part of the process by providing a set of powerful tools to import those sources and work with the data. Once data is in a Dataset, it becomes simple to select, group, and calculate properties of, the data. Additionally, Dataset makes it easy to work with real-time and changing data, which pose one of the more complex challenges to data visualization work.

Gonna keep an eye on this one. I'm curious to see how the visualization component starts to build out.

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• Open-source Data Science Toolkit
• Open Source Data Visualization Framework – Axiis
• How Open Should Open Source Data Visualization Be?

As a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab, Timeline by Verite is an open source project that lets you make and share interactive timelines. It's simple and customizable. Plug in your own data as JSON, or use the Google Docs template for an even faster route, and you're good to embed. It's also easy to grab source material from sites like Vimeo, YouTube, and Flickr. Score.

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• Grab Data with templatemaker
• 6 Easy Steps to Make Your Graph (Really) Ugly
• How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution

Gregor Aisch wanted a better way to make maps online that allowed something other than the Mercator projection, so he developed his own. The result is Kartograph, a lightweight framework "for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind." No more tiles.

The framework is still in its infancy, with not much documentation, but the map-making process seems to be straightforward. It's basically a two-step process. First you generate an SVG map with Kartograph's Python component, and then you load the SVG with the JavaScript component, which is built on top of Raphael.

Check out the showcase for a sense of what it can do. You've got your choropleth, chart symbols, and 3-dimensional projections. The star however is clearly the map of Italy, complete with a cute little ferry that follows a geo path.

[Kartograph]

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• Design advanced online and interactive maps with Polymaps
• Make Thematic Maps With Cartographer.js
• Sunlight Labs releases mapping framework, ClearMaps

This talk by Bret Victor caught fire a few days ago, but I just got a chance to watch to it in its entirety. It's worth the one hour. Victor demos some great looking software that connects code to the visual, making the creation process more visceral, and he finishes up with worhtwhile thoughts on the invention process.

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• Live Coding Implemented
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• Microsoft Live Labs Pivot: Interact With Massive Amounts of Data

The key idea is automation. The concept in Wolfram|Alpha Pro is that I should just be able to take my data in whatever raw form it arrives, and throw it into Wolfram|Alpha Pro. And then Wolfram|Alpha Pro should automatically do a whole bunch of analysis, and then give me a well-organized report about my data. And if my data isn't too large, this should all happen in a few seconds.

I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but the sense I get from others is that the part about data not being too large is key. Apparently it's still in the early stages and can't handle much data at once. The main hook is automated summaries, model fitting, and some graphs, but if you know enough to interpret the models appropriately, shouldn't you know enough to derive them?

I'd love to hear initial thoughts from those who have tried it. For those who haven't, it's $4.99 per month, but there's a two-week free trail.

[Wolfram]

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• Data Science is catching on
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• Open-source Data Science Toolkit

Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment, or Weave for short, is open source software intended for flexible visualization.

Weave (BETA 1.0) is a new web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. Weave is an application development platform supporting multiple levels of user proficiency — novice to advanced — as well as the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize data at "nested" levels of geography.

It looks like everything is done through a click interface, and you can piece together modules and link them, etc. There is some setup involved, but there are a number of video tutorials and documents to get everything installed.

Source code also available on GitHub.

[Weave]

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• Mapping human development in America
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With the new year, many of you (myself included) and your employers resolved to be more productive this year. You are going to finish that side project. Learn that new language. Run that long distance. You are going to be all that you can be. Then you spent all day in front of the television yesterday while playing Angry Birds. Little did you know, productivity and Angry Birds go hand-in-hand.

Enter Productivity Birds, created and used internally by Stamen.

We’ve used these graphs as the simplest-possible visualization of how we spend our time so we know how we’re doing relative to the budget for a project. Operationally, the data output of these graphs feeds directly into an accrued revenue model that lets us predict our income earlier. The day/week granularity makes it possible to collect the data as a team without making everyone unhappy with management overhead, and the bias toward whole- or half-day increments helps stabilize fractured schedules (not for me, though—my time is probably the most shattered of anyone in the studio).

Calendar time is represented on the horizontal axis and time spent on a project is the vertical. The object of the game is to hit the bird, where a bird over the pig means a risk of losing money, and a bird past the big means a risk of finishing late. The stacked area chart on the bottom shows who has been or is working on the project.

The small app, built with Protovis, is available on GitHub.

[tecznotes]

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Seeing how things change over time can be important for a business so that you can figure out what works best. Square, the company that turns your iPhone into a credit card reader, just released Cube, an open-source system to help you visualize time series data. It's built on MongoDB, Node, and D3.

Once you're all setup server-side, it's pretty quick to put together a dashboard, as shown in the video below:

A lot of the boiler plate time series work is done for you via the visualization components, but if you want to dig deeper, you can also access Cube's query and aggregation functions. This gets you sums, medians, minimums, maximums, and some others, as well as clumping by minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. If you've done this sort of a stuff with your own code before, you know how annoying it can be.

Cube is still a work-in-progress, but with Mike Bostock, now a visualization scientist at Square, this could be something to keep an eye on.

[Cube]