Visualization

• Explore Geographic Coverage in Mapping Wikipedia

  April 4, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  TraceMedia, in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, maps language use across Wikipedia in an interactive, fittingly named Mapping Wikipedia.

  Simply select a language, a region, and the metric that you want to map, such as word count, number of authors, or the languages themselves, and you've got a view into "local knowledge production and representation" on the encyclopedia. Each dot represents an article with a link to the Wikipedia article. For the number of dots on the map, a maximum of 800,000, it works surprisingly without a hitch, other than the time it initially takes to load articles.

  This is part of a larger body of work from Mark Graham and Bernie Hogan, et. al, which focuses mostly on the gaps, specifically in the Middle East and North Africa.

  There are obvious gaps in access to the Internet, particularly the participation gap between those who have their say, and those whose voices are pushed to the sidelines. Despite the rapid increase in Internet access, there are indications that people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region remain largely absent from websites and services that represent the region to the larger world.

  [via FloatingSheep]

• GM Uses LEGOs for Visual Management Tool

  April 2, 2012 to Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I thought this was a joke, but it appears GM really is using a "three-dimensional visualization system" called — wait for it — 3-D Visualization. It's meant as a generalized tool to track progress of systems, and they believe it could reduce time to make system changes, leading to fewer warranty claims, by 33 percent.

  3-D Visualization builds on GM's Problem Resolution Tracking System. If a transmission case breaks on a durability test vehicle, a problem resolution report documents the problem, and its corresponding LEGO block goes on a LEGO board. The block color identifies the area on the vehicle and the block size denotes severity; the bigger the block, the bigger the problem. Each block has an identification number and date of discovery, and the board shows its progress from root cause to solution to outcome. 3-D Visualization is applicable to any process that has volume and aging.

  There's no mention of a computer link in the press release (seems like something worth noting), but it does look like there's a cable coming out from the board. If that's the case, I want one.

  [Thanks, Daniil]

• 8-bit Google Maps, Start Your Quest

  March 31, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  If you go to Google Maps right now, there's an option in the top right corner for a Quest view. Click on that, and get the world in all its 8-bit NES glory. And great news: The map adventure is coming to an NES console near you. Just put in the cartridge, connect to the Internet via dial-up, and you're off to the races. See the world like you've never seen it before.

  Google explains in the video below.
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• How Much More Women Pay for Health Insurance

  March 30, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  So the Obama campaign posted this yesterday. Discuss.

• Rising Water Levels in the Immediate Future

  March 29, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Stamen Design, in collaboration with Climate Central, shows major areas that could be affected by probable rising water levels in the not so far off future.

  The context for this work is: while there are a great many papers, scientific studies, meteorological surveys and other things that fall under the rubric of things that normal people accept as true, there remains a persistent and nagging unreality to the idea that, in something like a normal human timescale, we'll see and have to reckon with large-scale changes to the world as we know it. It's one thing to say "the world is changing and all of us will have to deal with it." It's quite another to say "7.6% of the people and 9.1% of the homes may very well be underwater in Boston, and so you'll need to start thinking about that pretty damn soon, is that cool?"

  Boston, you better make friends with Kevin Costner. He is key to your survival.

• Live Wind Map Shows Flow Patterns

  March 28, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  I get kind of giddy whenever I see a tweet from Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. They rarely tweet, but when they do it's usually because they've released a new project and they always announce it simultaneously. Their latest piece shows live wind patterns, based on data from the National Digital Forecast Database. It's beautiful to look at.

  The most impressive bit is that, despite all of the animation, it's interactive. Roll over flows for wind speed and direction as well as zoom (with a double click) and pan to your area of interest.

• Where Campaign Spending is Going to

  March 28, 2012 to Network Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Making use of data from the Federal Election Commission and The New York Times Campaign Finance API, ProPublica takes a closer look at where campaign contribution is going.

  Many have been detailing the vast sums being raised by the presidential candidates and the super PACs supporting them. But where are all those millions being spent? Among other things, the answers can provide hints on potential improper coordination between campaigns and super PACs. Here are the 200 biggest recipients of spending by the major campaigns and most of the major super PACs.

  It's a sankey diagram with campaigns and Super PACs on one side and payees on the other. (I rotated the image above clockwise.) Select a campaign to see what they've spent their money on, or select a payee to see who's paying them. As I browsed through payees, my next question was what these companies, organizations, and people do since $377,222 from Obama for America to a company called PDR II DBA Share Share doesn't mean much to me. I haven't looked at FEC data in a while, but I vaguely remember a way to categorize spending.

  Find more information on the making of this graphic here.

• Perpetual Ocean

  March 27, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  Using a computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio (I think NASA has a thing for long names.) visualizes surface currents around the world. This is beautiful science here. Make sure you turn on high-def and go full screen.

  [via @aaronkoblin]

• What News Sites People are Reading, by State

  March 26, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Jon Bruner of Forbes, in collaboration with Hilary Mason and Anna Smith of Bitly, maps the most popular news source by state.

  Bitly's dataset, wrangled by data scientists Hilary Mason and Anna Smith, consists of every click on every Bitly link on the Web. Bitly makes its data available publicly—just add '+' to the end of any Bitly link to see how many clicks it’s gotten. For Bitly’s collaboration with Forbes, Smith and Mason looked for news sources and individual articles that were unusually popular in certain states compared to national averages. The interactive map starts by showing which news source dominates in each state by this measure: the Washington Post in Virginia and Maryland, the Chicago Tribune in Illinois, and so on.

  You can also select news sources to their click distributions across the country.

  I like how The Onion leads in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, although I'd be interested to know what other news sources the states read. A color scale might be informative, too.

• Custom Woodcut Maps

  March 26, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Just choose the location you want via the Google Maps interface, pick what materials you want, and Woodcut Maps puts your map through the laser cutter and assembles and packs your map by hand. Great gift idea or a nice little something to set on your desk.

• Inception Explained in Animated Infographic

  March 23, 2012 to Infographics  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Designer Matt Dempsey explains the storyline of Inception in this fun experiment. There were a few flowcharts that came out when the movie did, including one from Christopher Nolan, but this one takes the cake. Just keep on scrolling down to move through levels, and people (the colored circles) disappear and reappear as people go in and out of dreams and limbo.

• Watercolor Map Tiles

  March 21, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  A couple of years ago, when you thought about online interactive maps, what came to your mind? Lots of yellow. Online maps are looking a lot different these days though, and Stamen Design has played a big role in making that happen. In their most recently released project, they offer three tile sets to use with OpenStreetMap data, and they look really good.

  All three are something to see, but the watercolor tiles will knock your socks off. They're computer-generated, but they look hand-drawn by a skilled artist slash cartographer (which is really what the Stamen folks are).

• Redefining NBA Basketball Positions

  March 21, 2012 to Network Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  For the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference a few weeks ago, Stanford biomechanical engineering student and Ayasdi analyst Muthu Alagappan presented his work on redefining basketball positions.

  After studying players like LeBron James and Blake Griffin, many analysts are now suggesting that there are new positions, which are simply hybrids of the one's we already had. For example, some players are now labeled "point-forwards" or "combo-guards." But what if we were wrong about our initial five positions. Maybe a "Center" is just a label for people over a certain height, and there are actually three different types of big men in the NBA.

  An analysis, done with data exploration tool Ayasdi Iris, provided 13 possible positions, as shown above. Nodes and edges are colored by points per minute on a blue (low) to red (high) scale.

  So for example, those typically classified as centers or power forwards are classified as scoring rebounders, paint protectors, and scoring paint protectors. Dirk Nowitzki might be considered a scoring rebounder, whereas Joakim Noah is a paint protector.

  The point? Hopefully teams can use this information to make better decisions about who to trade and draft. Of course, I'm sure scouts know about these fuzzy positions already, so I think the next step is to look at what positions the best teams have and had, and more importantly, how a "one-of-a-kind" player can change everything.

• Innovation History via 6,000 Pages of Annual Reports

  March 20, 2012 to Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Fathom Information Design, in collaboration with GE, visualizes GE annual reports from 1892 to 2011. It doesn't sound so interesting at first, but browse the appearance of keywords, and you do get a sense of change.

  We've scanned 6,000 pages of GE's annual reports to build this interactive visualization. But why? What's the point? Not only does this provide a rich history of how GE has always been at work building, moving, powering and curing the world, but it is a true reflection of how the economy, U.S. and the world as a whole has progressed from 1892 until 2011. By diving deep into key terms, users can uncover interesting stories about innovation over the last century.

  Each column represents an annual report, and each little square represents a page. Select a keyword, and pages that use that word are highlighted. Finally, you can actually read each page of the report by clicking on a column. It expands.

  Update: Fathom provides background on what you can glean from the interactive.

• Towards a Low-carbon World

  March 20, 2012 to Statistical Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Carbon output. We want to reduce it, but some countries have a longer way to go than others. Pitch Interactive shows progress (or non-progress) by country in this interactive for the Climate Institute. Three indices are shown along with an overall score, which is a composite of the three, and countries are sorted by the average score from 1995 to 2008. Higher scores are better.

  The interaction makes this graphic. When you switch between indices, the countries are sorted appropriately and the time series for each country are drawn. You can also click on a country to get a closer view, which albeit is only four data points per country and index, but it's still useful.

  The lines for each country get thicker from left to right, which was to provide a sense of progress, but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to use thickness to represent an increase or decrease from the previous year. Then again, that's easy enough to see already, so maybe not.

• Evolution of the Hawaiian Star, 1893 to 1912

  March 20, 2012 to Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  UC San Diego student Cyrus Kiani animates 5,930 front pages from The Hawaiian Star, from 1893 to 1912. Pretty much everything on the page gets bigger — the columns, headers, and pictures — while the physical size of the page stays the same. Too bad it only goes up to 1912. It would've been fun to see the birth of the giant front page photo.

  (I thought I saw something like this done for The New York Times front page or online homepage, but I can't find it.)

• Visualizing the History of Everything

  March 19, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It's the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

  You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

  To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There's a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

• March Madness power rankings

  March 16, 2012 to Network Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  With NCAA March Madness in full swing, the basketball graphics are out in full force. This one by Angi Chau, shows the probabilities of teams winning each game, and eventually the championship, based on simulated bracket rankings. Done with D3, each node represents a game and teams are circled on the outside. Roll over a team, and get all the probabilities for that team going to the end or roll over a game to see the probability of teams winning that game. Sorry, Colorado. You have a 0% chance of winning it all. You, too, Vermont.

  Hopefully, Chau keeps updating throughout the tournament. And maybe some color-coding to indicate probabilities would be useful here. Now excuse me while I go place some educated bets. (One million on Colorado.)

• Comparing heritage in the Melting Pot

  March 15, 2012 to Mapping  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  At first I thought this map, by David Yanofsky for Bloomberg, was your standard county-level choropleth map of demographics. Select a self-described heritage from the first drop down and you see where all the people are by count. That's only kind of interesting, but you often just end up highlighting big cities.

  However, select a heritage from the second drop down menu to compare against the first and you get a relative scale. The above for example shows those of Chinese and Indian heritage. It's a simple calculation that makes a big difference in usefulness.

• Character relationships in the Iliad

  March 14, 2012 to Network Visualization  •  Nathan Yau  •  Share on Twitter

  

  The Iliad is an epic poem by Homer with a lot of characters and story lines going on at once. I vaguely remember reading bits and pieces in high school and getting totally lost. Santiago Ortiz explores these relationships in his latest work, which draws on the connections i.e. character sentence co-occurrences.
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