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Urban planner Neil Freeman maps the world's subway systems to scale in a minimal style resembling the scribbles or renderings of weird sea creatures by a two-year-old. I wish there were nodes to show stops, too, but the contrasts between the compact TRTA in Tokyo and RATP in Paris, and the spread out Seoul Metro and Transport for London is an interesting look.
[Neil Freeman via @kennethfield]
As we saw with movie barcodes, each film has a uniqueness that can be broken into bits of data. Cinemetrics, by Frederic Brodbeck, provides a different view.
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The New Hampshire results trackers are out in full force tonight. Ordered by my inclination to leave open in the background: Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN. Take your pick.
From Pasta by Design by George L. Legendre, it's exactly what you think it is. More pasta and equations at The New York Times. I may never see Fusilli the same way again. [via]
This graphic by commenting platform DISQUS, arguing that higher quality online discussions come from those using pseudonyms, splits the percentage of comments by identity into pseudonyms, anonymous, and real names. Is it a bubble chart? A pie? A coincidental bowl of jello? Actually, it looks like the height of each section represents the three values, so it's a misshapened bar chart of sorts. Oi.
It's trying so hard to look good that it comes across clunky and awkward.
If anything, they should have focused on the quality signals data on the left. Wouldn't that have been more interesting? Have at it in the comments.
[DISQUS via @miguelrios]
Google Maps is one of Google's best applications, but the time, energy, and thought put into designing it often goes unnoticed because of how easy it is to use, for a variety of purposes. Willem Van Lancker, a user experience and visual designer for Google Maps, describes the process of building a map application — color scheme, icons, typography, and "Googley-ness" — that practically everyone can use, worldwide.
We have worked (and driven) around the world to create a "map" that is a collection of zoom levels, imagery, angles, and on-the-ground panoramas all wrapped into one. Through these varied snapshots of our world, we are attempting to sew together a more seamless picture of the Earth—from its natural beauty to the surprising (and often absurd) details that make it our unique home. As our work progresses, new technologies give us the opportunity to get away from the limitations and complexity of standard cartography to provide a much more approachable and easy-to-understand map, loaded with data and information.
Remember when we had to refresh the page to see more of map?
Reddit user Laurel Quade mapifies the wonderful world of Reddit. Each country represents an area of interest, and "cities" are sized by inhabitants. I'm not familiar enough with the communities to know how accurate it is, but judging by the comments, I'd say pretty good.
[Redditland via @adamsinger]
In August 2006, real estate search site Trulia had 609,000 visitors. Five years later, there were 27 million. Trulia's most recent visualization shows this growth (bottom bar graph) and where people are searching for homes (map). Press play and watch it go. It's pretty much population density, but for me, the method is more interesting than the material in this case.
The grass aesthetic is kind of nice. It looks like you have a one pixel blade of grass for each zip code with a significant search count (If only there was something to provide scale...), and where there's more search there's more grass.
I also like the relatively simple tech behind the graphic. We usually see animated and interactive maps generating everything on the fly, but the maps and bar graphs for this are pre-generated for each month. Then each image is displayed one after the other chronologically like a flip book.
[Trulia via @shashashasha]
From Yanni Loukissas of the MIT Laboratory for Automation, Robotics, and Society, comes the story of the Apollo 11 lunar landing told via multiple time series running in parallel and the back and forth between astronauts and mission control.
The Apollo 11 visualization draws together social and technical data from the 1969 moon landing in a dynamic 2D graphic. The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline. The vertical axis is divided into several sections, each corresponding to a data source. At the top, commentators are present in narratives from Digital Apollo and NASA technical debriefings. Just below are the members of ground control. The middle section is a log-scale graph stretching from Earth (~10E9 ft. away) to the Moon. Utterances from the landing CAPCOM, Duke, the command module pilot, Collins, the mission commander, Armstrong, and the lunar module pilot, Aldrin, are plotted on this graph.
Climax hits around the 4-minute mark. Too bad it doesn't get to the one small step for man part.
Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro play around with a face tracker and color interpolation to replace their own faces, in real-time, with celebrities such as that of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton. Awesome. And creepy.
See Castro's video of him doing the same thing, but with a different blending algorithm. His looks more like a maleable mask rather than a face substitution.
Grab the code on GitHub.
[Video Link via Waxy]
Seth Stevenson, for Slate Magazine, covers cartographer David Imus' hand-crafted wall map, which Stevenson calls the greatest paper map of the United States you'll ever see.
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While we're on the topic of academic papers and how they're linked, Johan Bollen et. al used clickstream data to draw detailed maps of science, from the point of view of those actually reading the papers. That is, instead of relying on citations, they used log data on how readers request papers, in the form of a billion user interactions on various web portals.
Maps of science derived from citation data visualize the relationships among scholarly publications or disciplines. They are valuable instruments for exploring the structure and evolution of scholarly activity. Much like early world charts, these maps of science provide an overall visual perspective of science as well as a reference system that stimulates further exploration. However, these maps are also significantly biased due to the nature of the citation data from which they are derived: existing citation databases overrepresent the natural sciences; substantial delays typical of journal publication yield insights in science past, not present; and connections between scientific disciplines are tracked in a manner that ignores informal cross-fertilization.
Cross-fertilization. Saucy.
Each circle represents a journal and edges represent connections between journals, according to Johan Bollen et. al's clickstream model. Circles are color-coded by journal classifications from the Getty Research Institute's Art and Architecture Thesaurus.
So you have most of the engineering and physical sciences on the perimeter, medical-related areas to the left, and liberal arts is that middle cluster. Statistics is towards the top left, mixed in with demographics, philosophy, and sociology. There aren't many surprises in the clusters, but there are interesting, albeit weaker, links in the open spaces, such as religion and chemistry or music and ecology.
[PLoS ONE | Thanks, @drewconway]
From Autodesk Research, Citeology is an interactive that visualizes connections in academic research via paper citations:
The names of each of the 3,502 papers published at the CHI and UIST Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conferences between 1982 and 2010 are listed by year and sorted with the most cited papers in the middle. In total, 11,699 citations were made from one article to another within this collection. These citations are represented by the curved lines in the graphic, linking each paper to those that it referenced.
The interactive repsonds slowly to clicks and only works in Firefox for me, but it's interesting to play around even if you aren't familiar with CHI and HCI papers. It works better if you select one to three generations instead of all. Click on a specific paper and you get citations for that paper on the right (brown) and the papers that the selected cited on the left (blue).
Color-coding for categories, authors, or subject could add another level of meaning to this. For example, do we see the subject evolve? Do papers that focus on a certain subject site outside of the main topic?
[Citeology via infosthetics]
Food flavors across cultures and geography vary a lot. Some cuisines use a lot of scallion and ginger, whereas another might use a lot of onion and butter. Then again, everyone seems to use garlic. Yong-Yeol Ahn, et al. took a closer look at what makes food taste different, breaking ingredients into flavor compounds and examining what the ingredients had in common. A flavor network was the result:
Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients. Adjacent links are bundled to reduce the clutter.
Mushrooms and liver are on the edges, out on their lonesome.
[Nature | Thanks, Elise]
Transportation check-ins on foursquare. This is from this past Thanksgiving, but relevant again with Christmas around the corner. White represents check-ins on highways and roads (really?), orange is for trains, and blue is of course is same-day check-ins at airports. I guess no one takes Amtrak cross-country anymore.
[foursquare via datavis]
Transparency International released annual data for the Corruption Perceptions Index. The Economist plotted it against the UN's Human Development Index:
Comparing the corruption index with the UN's Human Development Index (a measure combining health, wealth and education), demonstrates an interesting connection. When the corruption index is between approximately 2.0 and 4.0 there appears to be little relationship with the human development index, but as it rises beyond 4.0 a stronger connection can be seen. Outliers include small but well-run poorer countries such as Bhutan and Cape Verde, while Greece and Italy stand out among the richer countries.
Interesting, although I suspect that the indices have some factors in common.
[The Economist via @mikeloukides]
As a resident at Eyebeam, Alexandar Chen visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites:
Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.
Interaction version here. Charming.
[Alexander Chen via @blprnt]
During the riots in London this past summer, a lot of information spread quickly about what was going on. Some of that information was true and some was not so true. The Guardian explores this spread of information on Twitter, and how fact and fiction seem to reveal themselves on their own:
A period of unrest can provoke many untruths, an analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests. But Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill.
Other rumors include when rioters cooked their own food at McDonald's (false), London Eye was set on fire (false), and Miss Selfridge was set on fire (true).
Each bubble represents a tweet and is sized by number of followers the tweeter has. The big one is usually the orignal tweet and the small ones that cluster around are retweets. Then the colors represent tweets that support, oppose, question, or comment. So when you play the animation for each rumor, bubbles swiftly pop up at the rumor peaks and then settle at true or false.
You can also use the scroll to move to a certain point in time, and roll over bubbles to see the tweets.
Really nice graphic and worth a look.
[Guardian via @jakeporway]
As part of their series on road accidents, BBC News mapped every recorded death on the road in Great Britain, from 1999 to 2010. That's 2,396,750 road crashes. As you'd expect, the map looks a lot like population density, but check out the videos, which show twelve years of data compressed as if it were one week, played out over a few minutes. Each light represents an accident.
Contrast with road fatalities in the United States.
Update: The BBC headline and copy seem to conflict, but this seems to be just accidents, and I'm not sure when casualties enter the equation. At 2.4 million crashes over 12 years, that's about 455 per day.
[BBC News via @aaronkoblin]
FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization. More...
Where are the biggest box office movies (not) streaming?
High-resolution maps of science
Find out what percent you are in
Backbone of the flavor network
Cinemetrics creates a visual fingerprint for movies
Vehicles involved in fatal crashes
World subway paths at scale
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