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.

Last week I attended the 29th annual symposium at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. The HCIL is famous for a little thing known as the treemap, created by the founder of the lab, Ben Shneiderman. It’s famous for lots of other visualizations and people too, but it’s best known for the treemap.

The annual symposium is put on by the lab to showcase it’s latest and greatest research. I sometimes forget that HCIL focuses on things other than visualization, so I had to sit, confused, through a few talks before I realized they weren’t about visualization (“Where’s the viz?” I was thinking). I won’t fault them for not being all about dataviz; the Social Network Analysis Strategies for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by lab Director, Jen Golbeck, was thoroughly entertaining and insightful work regarding social networks.
Read More

John Nelson of IDV Solutions put 56 years worth of tornadoes on a map. John plotted each tornado’s path and used brightness for its F-scale (level of intensity). He also added secondary charts for deaths and injuries and frequency by F-scale.

It makes a gorgeous map. I would love to see the data incorporated into the wind map.

So… practically speaking, if you live in the Midwest or Southern US, you should probably put this on your reading list.

Regardless of your politics, this chart is a great example of how data can tell a story. It’s a very simple graph by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life showing the changing attitudes about same-sex marriage. It shows that in the past couple of years, people have begun to be in favor of same-sex marriage.
Read More

This Scientific American article by Mark Fischetti and infographic by Jen Christiansen detail the consumption of water usage throughout the world. Jen used a Sankey diagram to show the top 10 water consuming countries and how their water was being used. One of Mark’s first points in the article is that population is the largest factor of water consumption. So I wonder why population adjusted numbers weren’t used. Many of the article’s commenters felt the same way. One posted a few of the countries per capita water use:
China: 2781 lts/day, India: 2591 lts/day, US: 7175 lts/day, Japan: 3752 lts/day

The way you display your data depends on the story you’re trying to tell. In this case, I wonder if the message could be better by using per capita.

[via @ChristiansenJen]

Recently there’s been a spate of infographic tools popping up (e.g., easel.ly, venngage, and infogr.am). Okay, I’m not sure if 3 qualifies as a spate, but it sure seemed like a lot in a short period of time. I gave Infogr.am a whirl, and it appears to be the front runner in terms of capabilities. Unlike easel.ly, you can *actually input data* into your infographic! What a novel concept. Venngage was hit and miss in terms of it accepting the data I entered. Infogr.am also has a bug in that you can’t have the number 0 in your data. Go figure.
Read More