Santiago Ortiz visualized every episode of the show in the interactive Lostalgic. It’s a set a four views that shows character occurrences and relationships and the lines they said during various parts of each episode.

The first view, shown above, is a bar chart vertically arranged by time, where each row represents an act. A profile picture is shown whenever the corresponding character says something. The next two views, the network graph and co-occurrence matrix show interactions between characters, and finally, if you want to relive it all over again, you can choose the reenactment, and the animation will cycle through the characters and scripts.

I only watched a handful of episodes right before the last one, but realized my efforts to watch all six seasons would be useless, even if I watched 24/7 before the finale. I got to the part where they found a dead person in a tree. So I’m only appreciating this from the technical side. I suspect fans of the show will love it. [Thanks, Santiago]

Mapping data over time can be challenging, especially when you have a lot of data to load in the beginning. Torque, the new open source project by CartoDB, is a step towards making the process easier.

Torque allows you to create beautiful visualizations with big temporal datasets by bundling HTML5 browser rendering technologies with a generic and efficient temporal data transfer format created using the CartoDB SQL API. Torque visualisations work on desktop and ipads, and work well on temporal datasets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of datapoints.

It’s still in the early stages but should be one to keep an eye on.

Check out this map for a sense of what Torque can help you do. The map animates historical edits to OpenStreetMap in Madrid. Also this. [Thanks, Carlos]

In case you’re interested in learning how much you suck at US state geography, here’s a game to help. The goal is to match up states on the blank country map, and you end with an average error in miles. I did not do well. [via kottke]

Jeffrey Heer on visualization for interactive exploration:

We were visualizing the results of a chain of models, including text modeling and dimensionality reduction. These models can sometimes give rise to misleading results, which we then spotted in the visualization. This result led us to consider how visualizations must do more than just turn data into images — it is vital that visualizations support interactive exploration and verification, so that one can not only uncover new hypotheses but begin the process of assessing their credibility. Another result of this work is that the insights gained from the visualizations enabled us to design better machine learning methods, such that our mathematical models of textual similarity better matched the judgments of human experts.

The rest of the Scientific American article is worth reading, mostly for the other quotes from Heer and Ben Shneiderman.

Yes, this is real. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a bomb-shaped diagram to illustrate the line that must be drawn to prevent Iran from creating nuclear weapons. No doubt this a serious matter, but I’m not sure the drawing lends value to the message.

In the same spirit of the quick update site on Olympic records a couple of months ago, the Guardian and Real Clear Politics tell you if Obama is still president and if Romney is president. Each balloon represents a state, sized by electoral votes, and the number of balloons in each hand represent projected voting, based on current polls. Straight to the point.

Hey, I think it’s election season, and you know what that means. It’s time to dig into campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission. The Washington Post gives you a view into the amount of money raised and spent in both camps, where it’s coming from and where it’s going. They start with the high-level aggregates, and as you scroll down, you get the time series, followed by the breakdowns for money raised.

The spending categories at the bottom are the most interesting bit. They cover advertising and mail, down to consulting and events. Payroll was a lot higher than I would’ve thought.