Visualization

• Every death on the road in Great Britain

  December 7, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  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]

• 40 years of boxplots

  December 6, 2011 to Statistical Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  Famed statistician John Tukey created the boxplot in 1970. It shows a distribution summary in a small amount of space. Hadley Wickham and Lisa Stryjewski look back on the old standby and its evolution up to present. Keep it in mind, while still used today, the boxplot was created with pencil and paper.

  One of the original constraints on the boxplot was that it was designed to be computed and drawn by hand. As every statistician now has a computer on their desk, this constraint can be relaxed, allowing variations of the boxplot that are substantially more complex. These variations attempt to display more information about the distribution, maintaing the compact size of the boxplot, but bringing in the richer distributional summary of the histogram or density plot. These plots can overcome problems in the original such as the failure to display multi-modality, or the excessive number of "outliers" when n is large.

  Alright, computers are useful. I guess.

  [40 years of boxplots]

• What seven billion people looks like

  December 5, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  Form design intern at Fathom, James Grady, maps population density in Dencity:

  Dencity maps population density using circles of various size and hue. Larger, darker circles show areas with fewer people, while smaller, brighter circles highlight crowded cities. Representing denser areas with smaller circles results in additional geographic detail where there are more people, while sparsely populated areas are more vaguely defined.

  While we've seen population density mapped, both directly and indirectly, the circle approach adds a different aesthetic that seems to add something about what it's like to live somewhere. Compare to a broader country-level map or one that uses only color. Doesn't this version feel like more?
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• Smiley installation shows the mood of a city

  December 2, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  

  Project Stimmungsgasometer (say what?) is a giant smiley face that changes based on the mood of Berlin citizens. When they are collectively "happy" the light is a smile, and when they are not, it is a sad face. Input comes from facial recognition software that takes in video from a strategically placed camera. The software estimates whether passers by are happy or not, and then installation changes accordingly.
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• US road fatalities mapped, 9 years

  November 29, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  For The Guardian, ITO World maps about 370,000 road-related deaths from 2001 through 2009, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. The map is kind of rough around the edges, but it gets the job done. Easily zoom in to the location of choice either by clicking buttons, or type in the area you want in the search box. Zoom in all the way, and you'll notice each accident is represented by an icon indicating type of accident, the age of the person who died, and year of crash.

  As you might expect, accidents are more concentrated at city centers and on highways. What I didn't expect was all the pedestrians involved.

  [Guardian and ITO World]

• Google Streetview stop motion

  November 24, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (18)

  Address is Approximate by Tom Jenkins tells the story of a lonely desk toy who goes on a road trip with Google streetview. I've watched this multiple times, and can't get enough. Beautiful and touching. [via]

• What topics science lovers link to the most

  November 23, 2011 to Network Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bitly, examined links to 600 science pages and the pages that those people visited next:

  The results revealed which subjects were strongly and weakly associated. Chemistry was linked to almost no other science. Biology was linked to almost all of them. Health was tied more to business than to food. But why did fashion connect strongly to physics? And why was astronomy linked to genetics?

  The interactive lets you poke around the data, looking at connections sorted from weakest (fewer links) to strongest (more links), and nodes are organized such that topics with more links between each other are closer together.

  Natural next step: let me click on the nodes.

  [Scientific American via @hmason]

• Who owes what to whom in Europe

  November 22, 2011 to Network Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (6)

  

  As the Eurozone crisis develops, the BBC News has a look at what country owes what to whom:

  Europe is struggling to find a way out of the eurozone crisis amid mounting debts, stalling growth and widespread market jitters. After Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were forced to seek bail-outs, Italy - approaching an unaffordable cost of borrowing - has been the latest focus of concern.

  But, with global financial systems so interconnected, this is not just a eurozone problem and the repercussions extend beyond its borders.

  Simply click on a country, whose arc length represents how much they owe, and arrows show debt.

  [BBC News | Thanks, Eugene]

• xkcd: Cost of everything

  November 21, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (8)

  

  Randall Munroe of xkcd charts the things that money pays for, from the item off the dollar menu all the way up to the total estimated economic productivity of the human race. Following the same scheme to show relative scales that he used for his radiation chart, you get a big picture, a zoom for another big picture, and so on.
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• History of the sky

  November 21, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (10)

  Ken Murphy installed a camera on top of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and set it to take a picture every ten seconds for a year. A History of the Sky is those pictures as a series of time-lapse movies where each day is represented with a grid. So what you see 360 skies at once:

  Time-lapse movies are compelling because they give us a glimpse of events that are continually occurring around us, but at a rate normally far too slow to for us to observe directly. A History of the Sky enables the viewer to appreciate the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen.

  Time-lapse: Yep, still fascinating.

  [murphlab via Data Pointed]

• Public opinion of the Occupy movement

  November 18, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (14)

  

  To get a gauge of public opinion and the Occupy movement, The New York Times asked readers what they they thought, placing their comments on a two-axis grid ranging from strongly disagree/oppose to strongly agree/support.

  On the horizontal: "Do you agree or disagree with the main goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement?" On the vertical: "Do you support or oppose the methods of the protestors?" So comments on the top right are those who strongly agree with the goals of the movement and strongly approve of protestors' methods. You can also color the dots and grid spots based on a range of disagree to agree for statements such as "Income inequality has contributed to the country's problems."

  Then to bring it home, comments are listed on the bottom with a small grid showing where that person selected. Put it all together and it's way more useful than just open threads elsewhere.

  [New York Times]

• American migration map

  November 17, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (8)

  

  Overhauling his migration map from last year, Jon Bruner uses five year's worth of IRS data to map county migration in America:

  Each move had its own motivations, but in aggregate they ­reflect the geographical marketplace during the boom and bust of the last decade: Migrants flock to Las Vegas in 2005 in search of cheap, luxurious housing, then flee in 2009 as the city’s economy collapses; Miami beckons retirees from the North but offers little to its working-age residents, who leave for the West. Even fast-growing boomtowns like Charlotte, N.C., lose residents to their outlying counties as the demand for exurban tract-housing pushes workers ever outward.

  Compared to last year's map, this one is much improved. The colors are more subtle and more meaningful, and you can turn off the lines so that it's easier to see highlighted counties when the selected county had a lot of traffic during a selected year. Speaking of which, you can see map the data for 2005 through 2009 via the simple bar graphs in the top right.

  Update: Jon also explains how he built this map sans-Flash on his own blog.

• 24 hours of Flickr photos printed to fill a room

  November 15, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (21)

  

  People upload thousands of pictures to Flickr every day, but the numbers and rates don't give the picture count justice. For the Future of Photography Museum in Amsterdam, Erik Kessels printed 24 hours of Flickr photos:

  As you might imagine, this results in a lot of images, that fill the gallery space in an avalanche of photos. "We're exposed to an overload of images nowadays," says Kessels. "This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences."

  [Creative Review via Waxy]

• Time-lapse of Earth from International Space Station

  November 14, 2011 to Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  Beautiful time-lapse video using photographs from crew onboard the International Space Station. I think this one's a hair ahead the Very Large Telescope. Watch in HD on Vimeo for extra flavor.

  [Video Link via kottke]

• What your favorite map projection says about you

  November 13, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  For the map nerds. xkcd says what your favorite map projection says about you. Mercator? "You're not really into maps."

• Politilines shows what candidates talk about during debates

  November 11, 2011 to Network Visualization  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  If you don't watch the candidate debates — and let's face it, that's just about everyone — you pretty much miss everything, except for stuff like Rick Perry forgetting agency names. Politilines, by Periscopic, lets you see what the candidates talked about each night.

  The left column lists top issues, the middle shows words used, and the right column shows candidates. Roll over any word or name to see who talked about what or what was talked about by whom.

  The method:

  We collected transcripts from the American Presidency Project at UCSB, categorized them by hand, then ranked lemmatized word-phrases (or n-grams) by their frequency of use. Word-phrases can be made of up to five words. Our ranking agorithm accounts for things such as exclusive word-phrases - meaning, it won't count "United States" twice if it's used in a higher n-gram such as "President of the United States."

  While still in beta, the mini-app is responsive and easy to use. The next challenge, I think, is to really show what everyone talked about. For example, click on education and you see Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry brought those up. Then roll over the names to see the words each candidate used related to that topic. You get some sense of content, but it's still hard to decipher what each actually said about education.

  [Politilines]

• Visual Résumés

  November 10, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (21)

  

  A couple of infographic résumé sites, vizualize.me and re.vu, sprouted up that use your LinkedIn data to show your career stats. Just create an account, connect it to LinkedIn, and you get some graphs that show when and where you worked. It's a visual form of your LinkedIn profile with a goal to replace the "old" and "boring" résumé that uses just text.

  Is this the best way to go though, if you're applying for a job?
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• Manual data design from Stefanie Posavec

  November 9, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  Designer Stefanie Posavec talks about her process of data collection, analysis, and design. There's a lot of advantages to knowing how to program, but there can also be value in meticulous manual discovery if you're willing to put in that extra time.

  Of course, it's still all about the data:

  So what inspires this level of analysis? "I'm interested in things that appeal to the really vigorous detailed aspect in me," she explains. "Everything I have done so far has revolved around things that I love such as books, language, maths and numbers. As long as I'm looking at something that I'm really interested in, it makes the days and hours of sifting through and analysing a subject easier."

  [Stefanie Posavec via feltron]

• A month of swearing in 90 seconds

  November 7, 2011 to Mapping  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  A fun map by Jamie Popkin of Little Earth that animates the use of the F-bomb, C-word, and "regular swear word" over a month. There isn't much information about where the data comes from, but I'm guessing Twitter. Each circle represents the use of a swear word, and the intensity grows as time passes. Too bad it doesn't cover the world or the entire United States.

  [PottyMouth via @awoodruff]

• Microsoft envisions the near future in technology and interaction

  November 3, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (11)

  In a follow-up to last year's visions of the future, Microsoft imagines interacting with data and information in 2020. It is the land of big displays, linked devices, and projections in the real world. It's mostly from a productivity standpoint, but there's crossover to the everyday.

  To be honest though, all I really want are power laces, a self-drying coat, a flying car, and rehydrating pizza. I wouldn't mind a hover board either, but it's not urgent. I don't think that's too much to ask. I can deal with not being able to flick graphs in the air if it means getting the important things sooner.

  [Video Link via @juiceanalytics]