After noticing the Obama campaign was sending variations of an email to voters, ProPublica identified six distinct types with certain demographics and showed the differences. It was called the Message Machine. Now ProPublica is taking it a step further, hoping to dissect every email from all 2012 campaigns.

Today, we are relaunching the Message Machine, and expanding it from handling just one mailing to handling every email from all of the campaigns in the 2012 election. It will seek a broad understanding in real time of the new and sophisticated ways modern campaigns are targeting voters.

It’s a big puzzle, and to solve it, we need a big sample of political emails, and an understanding of who received them. That’s where you come in.

If you get campaign emails on any subject — donation, get-out-the-vote, volunteering, events, etc. — just forward them to [email protected] using your email program’s standard forwarding feature. Nothing fancier than that needed.

Way cool. Although I bet there will be a lot of noise, especially from the smaller, less data-savvy campaigns.

Julian Koschwitz uses a typewriter linked to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists to generate stories about those who have fallen doing their jobs.

The typewriter installation On Journalism #2 Typewriter writes generatively constructed stories about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and today based on the existing data of their lives as well as their published work. The individual stories are connected through common fields of coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text the typewriter creates also images e.g. flags which are heavier distorted the more journalists got killed in that particular country.

I’m not sure how I missed this, but PBS’s America Revealed, which has apparently been running since last month, is the American version of the popular Britain From Above. Four episodes have aired so far on transportation, electricity, and manufacturing, along with a making-of episode. Here’s a clip from the transportation episode.

The series airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c. Although it looks like the full series ran already. It wouldn’t make much sense to go over the making-of in the middle. On the upside, four episodes are available online.

Had I known this existed, maybe I wouldn’t have subjected myself to the monstrosity of a show in United Stats of America.

Location data typically stays within the realm of online maps and digital check-ins, but in many ways it’s the most personal data that you can find. It represents where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. Meshu, by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx, is a project that takes this sentiment to heart.

Select and enter locations on a map or grab your check-ins from foursquare to create your own piece of unique jewelry — necklace, earrings, or cufflinks. Once you’ve got your design, you have your choice of acrylic, wood, nylon, and silver and you can pick from a variety of colors for each material. Hit complete, they’ll fabricate it, and you’ve got your own personal snapshot of life.

Screw the sword swallowing and giant screen of moving bubbles. Just get Rosling a handful of rocks and he draws a crowd.

[via infosthetics]

A previously banned Disney cartoon on menstruation. So informative.

[Thanks, Kevin]

After a couple of weeks of phone-only Internet, I’ve got my hands on a keyboard again and I’m looking at a screen bigger than four inches. It feels strange, but it’s good to be back.

My many thanks to Kim for holding down the fort while I’m gone. Be sure to follow her at @krees and check out Periscopic for your information visualization needs.

So what’d I miss?

Open data is everywhere. However, open data initiatives often manifest as mere CSV dumps on a forlorn web page. Junar, Lunfardo (Argentina slang) for “to know” or “to view,” seeks to help government and organizations take the guesswork out of developing their own software for such efforts.

Their open data platform allows organizations to collect and select their data, publish it, create reports and dashboards, and share their data online. The solution can be hosted or integrated into the organization’s website, and the data can be made open or for internal use only. End users can “follow” live data on the site, download it, or embed it. There’s also a built in API, so the organization doesn’t have to develop one of their own.

Junar looks like it’s ready to fill the gap in open data publishing with its soup to nuts approach. With lots of great features and an easy to use interface, it seems like a welcome change to the alternatives.

I’m a little dense when it comes to astronomy, but I think I understand this image. Simply entitled “Sky Map,” it was created by Polish designer, Paulina Urbańska. It shows various constellations and where their stars begin in the early evening. It then follows the path created by the earth’s rotation, illustrating where the same stars end up in the morning. Colored areas of the paths are daylight hours.

This map is just begging for some interaction to make it more useful, but it’s beautiful as is. Be sure to check out all of Paulina’s other lovely works.

[via @visualloop]

Network diagrams are notoriously messy. Even a small number of nodes can be overwhelmed by their chaotic placement and relationships. Cody Dunne of HCIL showed off his new work in simplifying these complex structures. In essence, he aggregates leaf nodes into a fan glyph that describes the underlying data in its size, arc, and color. Span nodes are similarly captured into crescent glyphs. The result is an easy to read, high level look at the network. You can easily compare different sections of the network, understand areas that may have been occluded by the lines in a traditional diagram, and see relationships far more quickly.

I love the elegance and simplicity of Cody’s work. He details every step of the new layout in his paper, and it’s definitely worth a read. The code for it will be pushed to NodeXL, an open-source tool for Excel, in the coming weeks.