Artist Gustavo Sousa used the Olympic rings as data indicators for statistics like obesity, homicides, and number of billionaires. Each ring represents a continent, and the larger the ring, the larger the value. Simple and an interesting metaphor shift.

Artist Brad Goodspeed imagined what the planets would look like if they were to orbit Earth, in place of the moon. His math is iffy, but the video is fun to watch.

[via kottke | Thanks, Thomas]

In partnership with social analytics service Topsy, Twitter launched a Political Index that measures sentiment towards Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.

The key is the comparison against all tweets for a sense of scale. As seen from the chart below, the index fluctuates closely with Gallup estimates.

Some consider Nigel Holmes, whose work tends to be more illustrative, the opposite of Edward Tufte, who preaches the data ink ratio. Column Five Media asked Holmes about how he works and what got him interested in the genre.

As a young child in England, I loved the weekly comics “The Beano” and “The Dandy.” They were not like American comic books; they were never called “books,” for a start. These English comics from the late 1940s and early ’50s had recurring one-page (usually funny) stories featuring a cast of regular characters. They had names like Biffo the Bear, Lord Snooty, and Desperate Dan. The comics were printed on poor-quality newsprint, which seemed to go yellow as you were reading it, but there was something very attractive about them.

I like the small dig on Tufte around the middle, while citing the paper that happens to find that Holmes’ graphics were more memorable than basic charts.

My own work at first was a little too illustrative, and Edward Tufte made a big fuss about what he thought was the trivialization of data. Recent academic studies have proved many of his theses wrong.

It seems the arguments haven’t changed much over the decades.

The Wall Street Journal visualized major political contributions, according to the Federal Election Commission, in a piece they call Political Moneyball.

Based on the money sent between the players (and other characteristics like party and home state), our presentation pulls players toward similar players and pushes apart those that have nothing in common. The players who are most interconnected (like industry PACs who try to make alliances with everyone) end up close to the center. Those who are less connected (like a donor who only gives money to Ron Paul) are pushed away from the center.

Analysis was powered by CartoDB, and the network by Tulip.

The challenge with these network graphs that have lots of nodes and edges is narrowing down what’s useful. With yesterday’s Internet map it’s easy to relate, because you just search for the sites of interest, and the large ones such as Facebook and Twitter provide context.

However, with Political Moneyball it’s tougher, because there are so many entities you’ve never heard of. My suggestion: Start with the examples section (such as who the National Rifle Association supports) in the sidebar, and go from there. It’ll be much easier to get into it.

Peter Nitsch created Ascii Street View, converting Google Street View to colored letters. Search for a location and experience the retro goodness. [via Waxy]

Using a new kind of MRI scanner, scientists at the National Institutes of Health mapped the connections in the human brain, revealing an intricate, grid-like structure.

“Before, we had just driving directions. Now, we have a map showing how all the highways and byways are interconnected,” says Van Wedeen, a member of the Human Connectome Project. “Brain wiring is not like the wiring in your basement, where it just needs to connect the right endpoints. Rather, the grid is the language of the brain and wiring and re-wiring work by modifying it.”

[via Matt Mullenweg]

Ruslan Enikeev created a searchable Internet map of links and bubbles, showing over 350,000 sites and two million links from 196 countries. Similar sites are closer together.
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From the Guardian US, a simple site that tells you if a record was broken today, and if so, what records. It was pieced together with Google Docs and github, and uses the New York Times Olympics API. [via]

No doubt there is going to be a lot of tweeting about the Olympics during the next couple of weeks, but sometimes it’s hard to get a sense of what people are talking about because of the high volume. Emoto, a team effort by Drew Hemment, Moritz Stefaner, and Studio NAND, is a Twitter tracker that aggregates sentiment around topics.
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