Aaron Rueben and Gabriel Isaacman used data from sampling air in tunnels, where there are a lot of cars, to create unique soundscapes that represent the chemicals in the area.

We created sounds from air samples (atmospheric particulate matter collected on filters) by first using gas chromatography to separate the thousands of compounds in the air (try it with markers at home) and then using mass spectrometry, which gives us a unique “spectrum” for chemicals based on their structure, to identify the compounds and assign them tones. Some compounds end up sounding clear and distinct, while others blur together into unresolvable chords. The result is a qualitative, sensory experience of hard, digital data. You can actually hear the difference between the toxic air of a truck tunnel (clogged with diesel hydrocarbons and carcinogenic particulate matter) and the fragrant air of the High Sierras.

The audio above represents the air in the Caldecott Tunnel Oakland, California. Note the heavy hydrocarbons towards the end. Contrast that with the audio for a remote forest in the Sierras below.

Emily Chow, Ted Mellnik, and Karen Yourish for The Washington Post mapped where the candidates and their wives have visited since June in an interactive with filters and multiple views.

On load, you see the visits of the eight, with a comparison between Democrats and Republicans. The map on top shows where, and the time series on the bottom shown when. Click on the map, and it zooms to show visits at city-level, and a click on a time slice updates a list of individual visits. Furthermore, you can select the individuals or categories for just the last 30 days, fundraisers, or your state.

The interaction lets you narrow down quickly and easily to what you care about. The only other thing I would’ve liked to see is a tighter coupling between the time series and the map.

Alberto Cairo’s newly translated book on information graphics, The Functional Art, is a healthy mix of theory and how it applies in practice, and much of it comes from Cairo’s own experiences designing graphics for major news publications. (I don’t think Alberto remembers, but what seems like many years ago, I sat right behind him for two weeks at the New York Times when they brought him in to help illustrate Raphael Nadal’s approach to tennis.)

His experience is hugely important in making the book work. There’s a growing number of books on information graphics, and many are written and illustrated by people who don’t have much experience displaying information, which leads to art books posing as something else. This isn’t one of those books. Cairo knows what he’s talking about.

As you flip through, you’ll notice a lot of examples, with a focus on process and even a handful of pencil sketches. The last third of the book is interviews with those well-established in the field, which also walks you through how some graphics were made. There’s a strong undertone of finding the balance between function (e.g. efficiency and accuracy) and engagement (e.g. use of circles).

Cairo comes from a journalism background, so the book is mostly in the context of presentation, but there’s of course plenty that you can apply to more exploratory graphics. I would say though that Cairo’s strength is in illustration and information, and so the book reflects that. This isn’t a book that covers visual data analysis or statistical concepts, but it is one that explores and describes the making of high quality information graphics that lend clarity to concepts and ideas. If you’re looking for the latter, The Functional Art is worth your time.

Check out the sample chapter on the publisher page, but then grab it on Amazon and save a few bucks.

As part of the Stories initiative that Facebook launched yesterday, an interactive map by Stamen Design shows how people are connected on Facebook, which offers a view into how countries are linked by language and history.

Immigration is one of the strongest links that seems to bind these Facebook neighbors, as thousands of people pour over borders or over seas, seeking jobs or fleeing violence, and making new connections and maintaining old friendships along the way. Economic links, through trade or investment, also seem to be strong predictors of country connectedness. And finally, one of the most overwhelming trends we found as we explored this graphic is the strong tie that remains between nations and their former colonizers, whose continued linguistic, cultural, and economic ties still echo today.

Stamen also explained other interesting facets in the map.

When you click on a country, the map updates to show where friends of those in that country are from. The top five are labeled. So whereas previous Facebook maps showed all connections at once, which focused on how many people use the service, this one focuses on the actual connections and what they mean.

Kat Downs, Laura Stanton and Karen Yourish of The Washington Post look at the tax breaks from the 1970s to 2011 in an interactive.

The U.S. government gives away more than $1 trillion a year in tax breaks — subsidies for individuals and companies that are often substitutes for direct government spending.
Once written into the tax code, they tend to stick around.

Each stripe represents a tax break, and height represents the value of the break in 2011. Interaction is key here, which lets you select categories such as education and health and mouse over breaks for more information. The chart above is also linked with a time series, which provides an alternative view to the same data.

After he saw a New York Times article on the gender gap among Wikipedia contributors (The contributor base is only 13 percent women), Santiago Ortiz plotted articles by number of men versus number of women who edited. It’s interactive, so you can mouse over dots to see what article each represents, and you can zoom in for closer look in the bottom left.

At first glance, the difference doesn’t look that big, but notice the values of the axes. The axis for men on the horizontal is from 0 to 200, the axis for women is 0 to 20, and the equal ratio line is the purple one that’s nearly vertical. So the only article with more women contributors is on cloth menstrual pads.

See also: what the chart looks like with equally-spaced increments. The results are clear.

Nate Silver says the weatherman is not a moron.

Still, most people take their forecasts for granted. Like a baseball umpire, a weather forecaster rarely gets credit for getting the call right. Last summer, meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center were tipped off to something serious when nearly all their computer models indicated that a fierce storm was going to be climbing the Northeast Corridor. The eerily similar results between models helped the center amplify its warning for Hurricane Irene well before it touched down on the Atlantic shore, prompting thousands to evacuate their homes. To many, particularly in New York, Irene was viewed as a media-manufactured nonevent, but that was largely because the Hurricane Center nailed its forecast. Six years earlier, the National Weather Service also made a nearly perfect forecast of Hurricane Katrina, anticipating its exact landfall almost 60 hours in advance. If public officials hadn’t bungled the evacuation of New Orleans, the death toll might have been remarkably low.

I like the bit later in the article that describes the number crunching machine and how humans are involved in the analysis. The National Weather Service has heavy-duty computing power to process data coming from weather stations across the country, but the computer is still bad at doing a lot of things.

To most people, statistics means plugging numbers into an advanced calculator that spits out values, without much thought involved. Those people don’t work with data.

The elections season is in full swing, and the New York Times graphics department ramps up its election coverage. With newly hired Mike Bostock teamed up with the Times’ interaction guy, Shan Carter, I’m sure we’re in for some interesting work.

The two, along with Matthew Ericson, covered the words used at the Republican and Democratic Conventions, but yesterday they put up an interactive that shows the words used at both conventions.

Each bubble represents a word, and the bigger the bubble the more often it was used. The blue and red split compares word usage of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, and bubbles are arranged horizontally left to right, from words favored by Democrats to those favored by Republicans. For example, “forward” is far to the left, and “fail” is far to the right.

While the visual provides a sense of what was talked about, the best part is that the visualization is an interface into the transcripts. When you click on a word, quotes that use that word are shown, so you can see what was actually said alongside keywords. Plus, you can enter your own word or phrase, and a new bubble is placed accordingly with the corresponding text on the bottom.

The 8-inch cube RGB Colorspace Atlas by artist Tauba Auerbach shows every color in said colorspace. Cubic rainbow. What does it mean? [Colossal via @periscopic]