Jeffrey Winter tests a hunch about links leading to philosophy on Wikipedia:

There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.

Winter’s curiosity led to this simple mashup. Type in some terms in the search bar and see where those topics lead to. Lo and behold, they all reach philosophy somehow. The above was my own search for economy, poop, science, Forrest Gump, hamburger, and Chicago. Philosophy: the Kevin Bacon of Wikipedia.

[Xefer | Thanks, Nigel]

UX designer and consultant, Hunter Whitney, describes a good mindset as you start digging into data, with the end target of visualization. “Why might you want to collect data about something and are you sure you know what you really need? … How are the data stored? … How are they summarized (statistically) and modified? … How are the charts displayed, formatted, and presented in the context of the full interface?”

[UX Magazine | Thanks, Elise]

Pete Warden, for O’Reilly Radar, compares current data responsibilities with those of harbor masters from the Victorian era. Warden warns:

Specialists like us who can understand and interpret data are in a privileged position. Most people have an exaggerated respect for arguments expressed as numbers or visualizations, because they don’t understand how many assumptions and simplifications go into these creations. It’s our job to remember that and balance our enthusiasm about the power of our techniques with some humility about their limits.

In other words: You should learn statistics. You don’t have to go out and get a PhD, but it’s helpful to be able to think like a statistician, so that you know the right way to think about data.

I wish there was a way to slow down time. Another month whirled by just like that. In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from the past month. Thanks again for sharing, tweeting, and liking. Every bit helps this little blog of mine reach a larger audience.

1. Flash vs. HTML5
2. Seven year itch: When do people get married and divorced?
3. Plush statistical distribution pillows
4. How to map connections with great circles
5. Find everywhere you can go in 15 minutes or less
6. MacGyver recipe book – All 7 seasons of diversions and mischief
7. Geography of hate
8. A century of deaths and a lot of fake blood
9. Why you shouldn’t eat farmed fish – a graphical explanation
10. Better Life Index measures well-being across countries

GeoCommons, an open repository of data and maps, launched version 2.0 this week, which is more feature-rich and robust than the first. Two of the major updates have to do with the fast-changing data landscape: amount of data and browser technology.
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My many thanks to the FlowingData sponsors. They help me keep this site up and running, and FlowingData wouldn’t be what it is without them. Check ’em out. They help you make sense of and communicate with data.

Column Five Media — Whether you are a startup that is just beginning to get the word out about your product, or a Fortune 500 company looking to be more social, they can help you create exciting visual content – and then ensure that people actually see it.

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.

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.

From Aran Kanani on DeviantArt. Try easing up on the tequila and maybe sticking in that middle realm next time, yeah? Have a nice weekend, all.

When I first got the opportunity to write a book, I was excited about it, and then I had to figure out what I was going to write about. Data visualization, obviously, but what about it? I was all over the place, and my early ideas are actually nothing like what Visualize This is now.
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Real estate site Trulia made a great move when they acquired mapping outfit Movity late last year to help users make informed decisions in home buying. A month ago, they launched a price reductions map to let you see how housing prices were changing. Now you can see what crime is like in that area you’re thinking about living in with Crime Map.
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The traditional way to gauge who we are as a country, state, or city is to turn to Census data for population, salaries, and family size. Many interesting stories can come from this data and it’s indispensable in making country-wide decisions and policies, but it only glosses the surface. Census data doesn’t so much tell us who we are than it tells what we are. Media artist Roger Luke DuBois takes a different type of census — from online dating profiles — called A More Perfect Union.
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A lot of the time when making plans to meet up with friends or family, you’re not so concerned with how far possible locations are than you are how long it takes to get there. Similarly, when deciding where to live relative to your workplace, you care more about how long it takes to get to work in the morning than you do how many miles away it is. Mapnificent lets you do this. Place the pin on the map, and see where you can get in a specified amount of time via public transportation or bicycle.
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Love ’em or hate ’em, tag clouds, or the more recent incarnation, Wordles, are everywhere (especially in slide presentations). Well, Wordle wasn’t enough. I mean, you can’t even make shapes with it. Gees. That’s where Tagxedo comes in. It works pretty much just like Wordle, except you have one more option. You can select from a variety of shapes to arrange your words into. Score.

[Tagxedo | Thanks, Tom]

Kevin Quealy and Jeremy White report for The New York Times on the rise and fall of housing prices with an interactive time series chart:

The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index for 20 major metropolitan areas is one of the most closely watched gauges of the housing market. The figures for March, released May 31, showed prices at their lowest point since the downturn began.

It’s similar to the home run count graphic from last year, although there’s a key difference. It’s not in Flash. It works equally well though.

Either click a city of interest on the left, or interact with the graph directly for more information. Not surprisingly, Detroit have been falling longer than any of the other 19 selected cities, whereas prices in Washington, D.C. have risen the most since February.

[New York Times]

Sometimes visualizing everything can turn out beautiful results. It seems to work especially well when the data is geographic, as we saw with All Streets, OpenStreetMap edits, and tourist maps. It turns out the everything method works for fictional worlds, too. The above and the video below are nothing but 11.3 million deaths by impact with object or terrain in the game Just Cause 2.
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The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in an array of four telescopes operated by European Southern Observatory, and together the array “can achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, meaning it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a car located on the Moon.” I don’t know much about telescopes or lenses, but I think that’s good. Watch the array at work, exploring galaxies far, far away and boldly going where no man has gone before in this breath-taking time-lapse.
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Do you know where your fish comes from? Well, yeah, it comes from the water, but there’s a little more to it than that. Nigel Upchurch, who previously explained the benefits of turning off your computer at night, describes in this short one-minute video why eating farmed fish isn’t the best idea. In short, while farming fish seems like a good solution to depleted wild supply, the process actually ends up using even more natural resources.

I like Nigel’s understated approach. Not too flashy that it makes you dizzy, but engaging enough to get you looking. The video is light on data, but that works well for a public service announcement.
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Aaron Koblin, Creative Director of Google’s Data Arts team, shares some of the many projects that he’s worked on his recent TED talk (video below). Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve undoubtedly come across his work. The takeaway of his talk:

An interface can be a powerful narrative device, and as we collect more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain a humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.

It’s not all facts and figures, dontcha know.

[Video Link]

Formatting data is a necessary pain, so anything that makes formatting easier is always welcome. Data Wrangler, from the Stanford Visualization Group, is the latest in the growing set of tools to get your data the way you need it (so that you can get to the fun part already). It’s similar to Google Refine in that they’re both browser-based, but my first impression is that Data Wrangler is more lightweight and it feels more responsive.
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The Pew Research churns out a lot of interesting results from a number of surveys about online and American culture, but they usually only shared aggregated results, pre-made charts and graphs. This is well and good for the information-consuming public; however, these results can spawn curiosities that are fun to dig into. Luckily, the Pew Research Center launched a Data Sets section that provides raw survey responses and the questions in a variety of easy-to-use data formats.

Our raw data, previously posted only as SPSS files, is now available in comma-delimited (.csv) format for all reports going back to 2003. We hope that making our data available in this open-source format will make analysis easier for researchers who don’t own a copy of SPSS to analyze our data.

This should be fun. Recent datasets include the social side of the Internet, health tracking habits, and reputation management.

[Pew Research via @kzickhur]

A while back, Google showed how Influenza outbreaks correlated to searches for flu-related terms with Google Flu Trends. It helped researchers and policy-makers estimate flu activity much sooner than with previous methods. Google Correlate is the evolution of Flu Trends in that now you can correlate search trends with not just flu cases, but with your own data or other search queries.
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