We’ve all seen Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns, so we know that there’s a certain rhythm to air traffic. GE, who has an aviation branch that designs engines, takes a more local approach to showing air traffic over the course of a day. I’m not sure how to describe it other than multi-stream video, or something like that. Just watch the video below.
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You might think that the only use for a map is to find directions to where you want to go. Or since you’re a FlowingData reader, you know they can be used for a bit more — like displaying large amounts of data. But if you think all they’re used for, then you’ve got some learning to do my friend. Learn the steps from the all-knowing MacGyver in the video below.

The best company you could have in a strange place is a map.

Words to live by. A map just might save your life several times as you run away from people shooting at you.
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Language changes. Culture changes. And we can see some of these changes via what authors write about in books over the years. Google’s Book Ngram Viewer lets you search through this data, and shows a graph similar similar to the output of Google Trends. The above is the trends for nursery school, kindergarten, and child care:

This shows trends in three ngrams from 1950 to 2000: “nursery school” (a 2-gram or bigram), “kindergarten” (a 1-gram or unigram), and “child care” (another bigram). What the y-axis shows is this: of all the bigrams contained in our sample of books written in English and published in the United States, what percentage of them are “nursery school” or “child care”? Of all the unigrams, what percentage of them are “kindergarten”? Here, you can see that use of the phrase “child care” started to rise in the late 1960s, overtaking “nursery school” around 1970 and then “kindergarten” around 1973. It peaked shortly after 1990 and has been falling steadily since.

Find anything interesting?
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I was going to post this graphic from Good when it came out, but decided not to. I made the same mistake when I first started out. It was another case of wrongly sized bubbles. But they fixed the problem, so now we can see what a big difference it makes. Read More

Government data technology has felt behind the times the past few years with outdated Java applets and such, which makes it tedious to look at all the data that is offerred. For example, if anyone understands the makeup of the United States, it’s gotta be the people at the Census Bureau, but the tools for public access are rough around the edges.

Luckily, we have the New York Times to move things along. Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Alan McLean apply their cartography skills to US Census data and let you explore a variety of demographics. It’s like a demographic buffet. There are multiple maps across four topics: race and ethnicity, income, education, and housing and families.
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While it was fun looking at the worldwide connections on Facebook, I thought it was more interesting to look at the places where there were very few connections, where it looked pretty dark on Paul Butler’s map. Some commented that was just a product of no people in those areas. Where there’s no people, there’s obviously no Facebook. This is true in many areas, but not all them.
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William Huber, Tara Zepel, and Lev Manovich compare magazine pages of Science and Popular Science.

In the first three decades of its publication, Popular Science used very few images. In fact, if we compare Science and Popular Science in the 1880s, we discover that the latter was at first more “scientific.” While photographs and illustrations accompanied Science articles, Popular Science used only occasional graphs. Over time the two magazines reverse their visual strategies. Science banishes photographs and illustrations as they come to be considered inappropriate for proper scientific discourse. Popular Science moves in reverse direction becoming highly visual.

Above are pages from Popular Science from 1872 to 2007.
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Data visualization and all things related continued its ascent this year with projects popping up all over the place. Some were good, and a lot were not so good. More than anything, I noticed a huge wave of big infographics this year. It was amusing at first, but then it kind of got out of hand when online education and insurance sites started to game the system. Although it’s died down a lot ever since the new Digg launched.

That’s what stuck out in my mind initially as I thought about the top projects of the year. Then I went through the archives. There was a ton of great work, too. So much so that I’ve gone with the top ten data visualization projects of 2010, instead of the top five.

One of the major themes for 2010 was using data not just for analysis or business intelligence, but for telling stories. People are starting to make use of the data (especially government-related) that was released in 2009, and there was a lot more data made available this year (with plenty more to come). There were also more visualization challenges and contests than I could count.

So here are the top 10 visualization projects of the year, listed from bottom to top.
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As we all know, people all over the world use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. You meet someone. You friend him or her on Facebook to keep in touch. These friendships began within universities, but today there are friendships that connect countries. Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler visualizes these connections:

I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

In other words, for each pair of countries with a friend in one country and a friend in the other, a line was drawn. The more friends and distance between two countries, the brighter the lines on a black-blue-white color scale. The “stronger” connections were drawn on top, so they are more visually prominent.

It might remind you of Chris Harrison’s maps that show interconnectedness via router configurations.
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xkcd geekdom for your slow Monday afternoon. Can you imagine being with someone who doesn’t label axes? Outrageous. [xkcd]

Google recaps search trends for the year in Google Zeitgeist 2010, from the World Cup and the Olympics to the earthquake in Haiti and the BP oil spill. Above is relative search volumes around the world during the ash cloud in Iceland. You can browse the interactive map, or use the timeline to watch changes over significant events during the year.

A video (below) also accompanies the interactive, showing how the physical world and digital are melding ever so nicely.
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Fabian Gonzalez goes minimalistic on superheroes. I like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I used to pretend I was Donatello, the smart inventer one. Although in retrospect I’m probably more like Raphael, the moody and irritable one. Available in print and shirt form. [Society6 via Data Pointed]

Brett Coffman and Juan Thomassie for USA Today have a look at how college coaches from the top 25 teams ranked other teams. You can look at it from two directions. You can look at the data by team, and see what all the other coaches ranked a team, along with rank by week. You can also see the data by individual coach to see his top 25 rankings. Albeit the latter view isn’t very useful unless you have a specific coach in mind. [USA Today | Thanks, Kevin]

Gareth Holt designed several charts and graphs for Rank: picturing the social order 1516-2009 at the Leeds Art Gallery. Above is a divided shirt that depicts the social classes. I guess you could call it a stacked shirt chart. There’s another that uses forks. I call it picture with forks. [Gareth Holt via We Love Datavis]

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the Web, says analyzing data is the future of journalism:

“Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you’ll do it that way some times.

“But now it’s also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country.”

The Guardian post focuses on current journalists learning new skills, but what we’re also going to see is a new type of person — computer scientists, statisticians, and interaction designers — become the storytellers.

You might think this is a joke, but this is serious business. From Laura Noren, a PhD candidate in sociology, the axes of public peeing:

This was something I used to help me think through the two main axes that determine peeing behavior – biological and social control. Urination is a biological function that has been subjected to a great degree of social control. Unfortunately, urban design has not kept pace with the demand for clean, easily accessible public restrooms for humans. And there has been no attempt to create any kind of system to deal with canine urine. In most cities it is illegal for humans to pee in public but both legal and widely accepted for dogs to pee where ever they like (in New York, they cannot pee on the grass in parks).

It seems the only solution is to let people go wherever they want, as the dogs do.

[Graphic Sociology]

Certain fields of study tend to cover many of the same topics. Many times, the two fields go hand-in-hand. Electrical engineering, for example, ties tightly with computer science. Same thing between education and sociology. Daniel Ramage and Jason Chuang of Stanford University explore these similarities through the language used in their school’s dissertations.
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Very Small Array has some fun with Google’s autocomplete. Utah… Jazz. Kentucky… Fried Chicken. New York… Times.

[Very Small Array via @mericson]

I don’t get soap operas. People get married, divorced, evil twins show up, babies are born, people are shot, and every now and then someone becomes the hostage of an ex-lover. It’s too complex for my simple mind. Luckily, here’s a video that explains all of the relationships in the Bold and the Beautiful, from 1987 up to present.
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My many thanks to the FlowingData sponsors. They keep the lights on and help make this little blog of mine possible. Check ’em out. They help you understand your data.

Tableau Software — Combines data exploration and visual analytics in an easy-to-use data analysis tool you can quickly master. It makes data analysis easy and fun. Customers are working 5 to 20 times faster using Tableau.

InstantAtlas — Enables information analysts and researchers to create highly-interactive online reporting solutions that combine statistics and map data to improve data visualization, enhance communication, and engage people in more informed decision making.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Contact me at [email protected] for more details.