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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A lot of Olympic events are over and done with in a few minutes (or seconds), so the difference between winning and losing can be something really tiny. As the games in London get started, The New York Times put together a great series on the tiny details that athletes try to hone in on as they jump over hurdles, twist over the vault, and hand off the baton.

The feature was surprisingly sort of buried in a lot of other Olympic coverage, but hopefully they put together more of them. The combination of graphics and insight from athletes is uber interesting.

Update: The butterfly was just added, and cycling is up next.

Lee Drutman, a Senior Fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, compared the tax returns of previous presidents against that of Mitt Romney.

This scatter plot highlights two things: First, the two highest income years we observe are Romney 2011 ($21.6 million) and Romney 2010 ($20.9 million). Nobody else comes close. The next closest are Obama 2009 ($5.5 million) and Obama 2007 ($4.1 million).

Second, the two lowest effective tax rates we observe also belong to Romney. The 2012 Republican candidate paid an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010 and 15.4% in 2011. Next lowest is George H.W. Bush, who paid a 15.5% rate in 1991. By contrast, in Obama’s two highest earning years, he paid a rate of 32.6% (2009) and 33.7% (2007).

Of course the difference is there because most of Romney’s income comes from investments, but wow, what a contrast.

[Thanks, Chris]

The Washington Post has a fine graphic on swimming world records and the changing swimsuit, from speedo to full rubber body suit.
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