Visualization

• A quarter century of satellite imagery

  May 21, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  In collaboration between USGS, NASA and TIME, Google released a quarter century of satellite imagery to see how the world has changed over time.

  The images were collected as part of an ongoing joint mission between the USGS and NASA called Landsat. Their satellites have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives that look something like this example (courtesy of the USGS).

  We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.

  Be sure to check out the Timelapse feature on Time.

• Coaches are highest paid public employees

  May 17, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  Deadspin made a straightforward map that shows the highest paid public employee in each state.

  Based on data drawn from media reports and state salary databases, the ranks of the highest-paid active public employees include 27 football coaches, 13 basketball coaches, one hockey coach, and 10 dorks who aren't even in charge of a team.

• Ratings of TV shows over time

  May 16, 2013 to Statistical Visualization by Nathan Yau

  

  The quality of television shows follow all kinds of patterns. Some shows stink in the beginning and slowly gain steam, whereas others are great at first and then lost momentum towards eventual cancellation. Using data from the Global Episode Opinion Survey, Andrew Clark visualized ratings over time for many popular shows in an interactive.
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• An exploration of recurring jokes on Arrested Development

  May 15, 2013 to Network Visualization by Nathan Yau

  

  Watch Arrested Development enough and you start to realize there are a lot of recurring jokes in various episodes and seasons. In an interactive by Beutler Ink and Red Edge, Recurring Developments shows what episodes jokes, such as the awkwardness between George Michael and Maeby, happen. And like the visualization this is based on, you can also go the other way around and look at the recurring themes in each episode.

  The interaction is fairly straightforward. Jokes are on the left and a listing of episodes is on the right. Click a joke and orange lines extend to corresponding episodes. Click an episode and lines extend to corresponding jokes.

  Excuse me while I go on an Arrested Development binge on Netflix.

• Map of live Wikipedia changes

  May 14, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  On Wikipedia, there are constant edits by people around the world. You can poke your head in on the live recent edits via the IRC feed from Wikimedia. Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi are scraping the anonymous edits, which include IP addresses (which can be easily mapped to location), and naturally, you can see them pop up on a map.

• Geography of hate against gays, races, and the disabled

  May 13, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  In a follow-up to their map of racist tweets towards Barack Obama, the folks at Floating Sheep took a more rigorous route to get around the challenges of sentiment analysis. Over 150,000 geotagged tweets against races, sexuality, and disabled were manually classified and mapped.

  All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative. Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, California has the highest absolute number of tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map. So when viewing the map at a broad scale, it’s best not to be covered with the blue smog of hate, as even the lower end of the scale includes the presence of hateful tweeting activity.

  Hard to believe this stuff is still around. It looks like I might want to stay clear of some parts of Virginia. (The aggregation at the national level seems a bit aggressive. When you zoom in on the map, the polarity between the east and west doesn't seem so strong.)

  Update: Be sure to read the FAQ before making snap judgements.

• Cicada insects out to play after 17 years

  May 10, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  This is my first time hearing about this, probably because it only happens every 17 years. After 17 years of development in the ground (getting nourishment from tree roots), the Cicada insects are starting to swarm on the east coast. Hundreds of millions of them mate, make a lot of noise, and then die. Adam Becker and Peter Aldhous for New Scientist mapped data maintained by John Cooley and Chris Simon from the University of Connecticut to show the cycles of the Cicada.

  There are 17-year broods, which is what's happening now, and there are 13-year broods, with the next one expected next year in Louisiana.

  Click the play button on the top right to see the various broods appear over time, and be sure to turn on the audio (in the left panel) for added flavor. [Thanks, Peter]

• Exploration of how much geography is needed in metro maps

  May 9, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  Terrence Fradet of Fathom Information Design ponders whether metro maps suffer or benefit by leaving out geography. Geographic accuracy is good, but sometimes it can confuse your audience.

  Just how important is it that metro maps represent geography? This piece came from an interest in how metro maps over the past century have tiptoed between geographic and topological representations—topological meaning to forgo all spatial integrity and instead represent the connectivity of a specific environment.

• Putting today into perspective

  May 9, 2013 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  When you focus on all the small events and decisions that happen throughout a single day, those 24 hours can seem like an eternity. Graphic designer Luke Twyman turned that around in Here is Today. It's a straightforward interactive that places one day in the context of all days ever.

  You start at today, and as you move forward, the days before this one appear, until today is reduced to a one-pixel sliver on the screen and doesn't seem like much at all.

• YouTube Trends map shows most popular videos by region

  May 7, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  I don't know about you, but when I go to YouTube, I check my subscriptions and then look at what videos are currently popular. Because you know, it's important to stay up to date on the most current news about kittens, people getting caught doing weird things, and movie trailers. The YouTube Trends Map is another way to see what's popular, but from a geographic and demographic point of view.
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• Map shows street quality in Los Angeles

  May 7, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  Nevermind the horrible traffic in Los Angeles, where it takes a several hours to get somewhere when it should only take thirty minutes. The road quality isn't so great either. Using data from the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services, which scores street segments on a 100-point graded scale, Ben Poston and Ben Welsh for The Los Angeles Times mapped road quality in the city.

  Red represents segments with an F grade, which means resurfacing or reconstruction is required, and green are segments with A grade, which mean no cracking and no maintenance required. Yellow is everything in between. Jump to a specific area via text entry and/or see the data in aggregate, by neighborhood or council district.

  The streets don't look great almost any way you look at it.

• Color signatures for classic novels

  May 6, 2013 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  Jaz Parkinson made color signatures for classic novels. Basically, mentions of colors were tabulated and the results are shown as stacked bars, so it's fairly basic, but if you know the novels, these will mean something to you. For example, here are the signatures for Alice in Wonderland and Of Mice and Men.

  Continue Reading

• Glowing landscape shows river history

  May 3, 2013 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  The poster by Daniel E. Coe shows the life-like historical flows of the Willamette River in Oregon.

  This lidar-derived digital elevation model of the Willamette River displays a 50-foot elevation range, from low elevations (displayed in white) fading to higher elevations (displayed in dark blue). This visually replaces the relatively flat landscape of the valley floor with vivid historical channels, showing the dynamic movements the river has made in recent millennia. This segment of the Willamette River flows past Albany near the bottom of the image northward to the communities of Monmouth and Independence at the top. Near the center, the Luckiamute River flows into the Willamette from the left, and the Santiam River flows in from the right.

  Only $15 in print. [Thanks, Larry]

• Fixing bus routes using mobile data

  May 2, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  In parts of the world where there are few smartphones and GPS-enabled devices, transportation architecture has to be designed based on less granular resources, such as surveys, which can result in rough estimates. IBM researchers are looking into how data from simple cell phones can be used instead to see how people move.

  The IBM work centered on Abidjan, where 539 large buses are supplemented by 5,000 mini-buses and 11,000 shared taxis. The IBM researchers studied call records from about 500,000 phones with data relevant to the commuting question...

  While the data is rough—and of course not everyone on a bus has a phone or is using it—routes can be gleaned by noting the sequence of connections. And IBM and other groups have found that these mobile phone “traces” are accurate enough to serve as a guide to larger population movements for applications such as epidemiology and transportation.

  [via @krees]

• Lego minifigure taxonomy

  May 2, 2013 to Network Visualization by Nathan Yau

  

  There are over 4,000 Lego minifigure characters ranging from plumbers and judges to licensed ones such as Harry Potter and SpongeBob SquarePants. Christoph Bartneck from the University of Canterbury created a taxonomy to logically categorize all of the characters.

  If only the categories in the interactive expanded to show pictures or links to the actual minifigures. That would be killer. Hey, illustrators, looking for a side project? There you go.

• History of San Francisco street names mapped

  May 1, 2013 to Mapping by Nathan Yau

  

  Where do street names come from? Sometimes there's actual history behind a name, and other times a street just needed a label, so someone pretty much pulled one out of a hat. For the former, there can be some interesting stories at work. Web developer and Knight-Mozilla fellow Noah Veltman mapped the history of street names in San Francisco under this premise. Just click on a blue street in the interactive and information pops up.

• A thorough Facebook analysis by Stephen Wolfram

  April 25, 2013 to Statistical Visualization by Nathan Yau

  

  Stephen Wolfram analyzed the Facebook world, based on anonymized data from the Wolfram|Alpha Data Donor program. He visits topics from how people friend, how the Facebook world compares to the real one, and how people change with age.

  People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also talk more about movies, television and music. Women talk more about pets+animals, family+friends, relationships—and, at least after they reach child-bearing years, health. The peak time for anyone to talk about school+university is (not surprisingly) around age 20. People get less interested in talking about "special occasions" (mostly birthdays) through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on.

  Worth the full read.

• Stop motion video: Food you can buy for $5 in different countries

  April 24, 2013 to Infographics by Nathan Yau

  This stop motion video from BuzzFeed shows how much food you can buy for $5 USD in different countries. For example, five bucks will get you 7 pounds of rice in the United States and 12 pounds in China. The video is straightforward, but the animation of food appearing and disappearing — or rather, added and taken away — lends well to the context that you wouldn't get from a quick chart.

  The gut instinct seems to be "Hey, we should all move to China." Better follow that up with non-Chinese salaries.

• Flowchart for movie time travel

  April 23, 2013 to Infographics by Nathan Yau

  

  Mr. Dalliard provides this handy flowchart to organize time travel movies. And yes, I immediately looked for Back to the Future and backtracked.

• Orbiting planets found by NASA Kepler mission

  April 22, 2013 to Infographics by Nathan Yau

  The Kepler mission by NASA has discovered more than 100 planets that orbit stars. Jonathan Corum for The New York Times visualized the ones with known size and orbit using small multiples. Scroll all the way down for our solar system as a point of reference.