The most recent version of Protovis, the open-source visualization library that uses JavaScript and SVG, was just released not too long ago – this time with more layout and examples. This is especially helpful since Protovis was “designed to be learned by example.” Among the new stuff is the ever popular streamgraphs, along with the force-directed layout. With only 10 to 20 lines of code, you’ll have your viz, so lots of bang for the buck.

There are, however, still some limitations with dreaded Internet Explorer (mainly with interaction), but they’re getting there, I think.

Find plenty of other examples on the Protovis site. Robert Kosara has also started a series of Protovis tutorials on how to use the library if you want some guidance on where to start.

Excited about the 2010 MTV Movie Awards? Yeah, me neither. But if you want to keep an eye on things while you watch or do something else (you know, in case there’s a Kanye moment), MTV and Stamen provide a tweet tracker for the event. Similar to the VMA tracker last year, movies and celebrities are highlighted based on tweets about them per minute. The look, feel, and views are different, however.
Read More

BP processes about 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, across six refineries in the United States. In total, 150 refineries in the United States process just under 18 million barrels per day, so BP processes about 8.5 percent of it. However, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity, 97 percent of the most dangerous violations found by OSHA were on BP properties.
Read More

You’ve heard about the struggling musician. It’s a tough business. How tough is it though? David McCandless of Information is Beautiful, looks at how much musicians make from major online outlets. Bubbles are sized by how many sales or plays a song must get before someone makes US monthly minimum wage.
Read More

Alice Rawsthorn for The New York Times reports on Charles Booth’s London poverty maps, from the late 1800s, currently on display at the Museum of London. During a time when people saw rich and poor living separately, Booth’s map showed the contrary:

Mr. Booth had set out to discover how many people were living in poverty, to determine why and what could be done to help them. As well as proving that there was much more poverty in London than the official statistics suggested, his research revealed the nuances of an increasingly complex city with different degrees of hardship, where the rich often lived alongside the poor.

Of course, no visualization-related piece is complete without a little bit of data overload melodrama and a hat tip to Processing:

As the data crisis worsens, finding new ways to make sense of this tsunami of information and to illustrate it clearly becomes ever more urgent. One solution is data visualization, a new visual language now being developed by information designers. Using sophisticated programming languages, like Processing, they are distilling colossal quantities of baffling data into seductive digital animations — or visualizations — many of which then change in real time to reflect what is actually happening.

Ah, that hit the spot.

[via]

Norman Nie, co-creator of SPSS (acquired by IBM for $1.2 billion last summer), and his group Revolution Analytics aim to bring analysis to a wider audience with a product built on top of R, the popular statistical computing language. They call it Revolution R.

Noted in a recent Forbes article:

R is a powerful tool but difficult for novices to use. Nie’s Revolution Analytics aims to make it more accessible with a better-organized library, capabilities for bigger jobs and a user interface that lets users drag and drop statistical analyses into place, outputting easily read charts.

The rest of the article is about Nie, the growing importance of data, etc.

I’m curious. Has anyone tried Revolution R? They say that it has “faster performance and greater stability” than base R. Is it that much better?

[Thanks, Victoria]

If it Was My Home is a simple but effective concept. Enter your location, and the oil spill is overlayed on top. It’s gotten to the point where the area the spill covers is greater than the area of some states. Scared? You should be.

It’s fun to imagine the future. Every few months, someone takes a stab with a concept video or a proof of concept prototype, providing a glimpse into human-computer interaction and data visualization in a decade or two. What will it really look like? It’s anyone’s guess. But if people’s imaginations are any indication, the future will be filled of data displays and 3-dimensional holographic objects projected into physical space.
Read More

Stephen Walter’s The Island looks like an ordinary map of London from afar. Just a bunch of scribbles, actually. But zoom in and you get something more.

The Island satirises the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.

Zoom in once. Outlines and locations appear.
Read More

Maybe there’s something to this whole data science thing after all. Mike Loukides describes data science and where it’s headed on O’Reilly Radar. It’s a good read, but statisticians get clumped into suits crunching numbers like actuarial drones:

Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis. What differentiates data science from statistics is that data science is a holistic approach. We’re increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are involved with gathering data, massaging it into a tractable form, making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others.

What is data science? It’s what well-rounded statisticians do.

Health and Human Services (HHS) is about to announce the launch of their Community Health Data Initiative over in DC right now. The point is to make health data more usable for consumers and communities.

Today groups will be presenting how they’ve made use of the data in the past few weeks from about 9:30 to 10:30 – as in right now. I’ve embedded the live webcast below.

They’re just going through the formalities of thank yous and intros right now, but the good stuff should start soon.
Read More

BBC Radio 1 takes a shot at displaying the top 40 chart visually in The Love 40. It’s actually a lot better than I thought it was going to be.

A grid view of bubbles arranges singles (or albums) such that you have each column as a day, and each row as a rank. So for example, the top right bubble, is the most recent number one single, which at the time of writing this, is Nothin’ on You by B.o.B, featuring Bruno Mars. Roll over any song (i.e. bubble) and a connecting path shows how the song has risen or fallen in the past few weeks.
Read More

It takes a lot of work for a bill to become a law. It’s a complex process that most of us know nothing about, other than the tidbits that linger in our memory from high school government class. Mike Wirth clarifies the process in his gameboard-like submission to Sunlight Labs’ competition, Design for America. Mike’s entry won top honors in the “How A Bill Becomes a Law” category.

Another great month of FlowingData. Thanks, everyone for the retweets, likes, stumbles, etc. Every share helps FD reach a wider audience, so I really appreciate it. For the new readers, or in case you missed them, here are the top posts of May, based on a combination of views, comments, and links:

1. What America spends on food and drink
2. Dreaming in numbers
3. The Boom of Big Infographics
4. Data Underload #21: Exit Strategy
5. Facebook privacy options untangled
6. Most influential people on Twitter – Cosmic 140
7. BP tries to mislead you with graphs
8. Field guide to fanboys
9. Evolution of Facebook privacy policies
10. Marge Simpson is Europe in disguise

From the Forums

Got a visualization question or something to share? Post it in the forums. Make sure you register first though.

• Org Chart Alternatives – We didn’t come up with any. Got any in mind?
• Graphic on Fight Against Breast Cancer – “Wow, so much wrong just to make it look like a boob. :\” — krees
• Large pile of ranking data for programming languages. – Anyone want to do something fun with it?
• Nokia: Looking for a data visualization specialist – Looking for a BI-related job in New York?

In case you were confused by the Pulp Fiction storyline, dehahs has plotted it out for you. Inspired by Randall Munroe’s character timeline, each line represents a character and intersections show interactions. The story board rests in the background. Like any good Quentin Tarantino flick, everyone dies more or less. Bang, bang. Boom, boom.

[via]

The ever-popular New York subway map is getting some work done, and will reveal itself with its first major redesign in over a decade:

The new subway map makes Manhattan even bigger, reduces Staten Island and continues to buck the trend of the angular maps once used here and still preferred in many other major cities. Detailed information on bus connections that was added in 1998 has been considerably shortened.

Read More

Men’s Health takes a look at America’s most sugary drinks and their junk food equivalents. A Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with whipped cream (venti size) from Starbucks has the same amount of sugar as 8½ scoops of Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream. Calorie-wise, the picture might look a little different. Still though, that’s a lot of sugar.

Be careful what you drink, boys and girls.

[via Boing Boing]

In a collaboration between CNN and Stamen Design, Home and Away offers a sobering view into casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, since 2001.

On the left is a map that shows hometown locations, and on the right is a map of casualty locations. The two maps are linked such that you see where people are from and where they served. Linked filters on the bottom show distributions of age, location, and date. Select or search for an individual to see further details. Friends and family are also able to submit fond memories of fallen loved ones.

Altogether, the interactive provides a connection between the data and the people behind it. See the full piece on CNN.

It’s not easy keeping up with what’s going on around the Web. Trending topic here. Another topic there. Zoe Fraade-Blanar, a graduate student at NYU ITP, hopes to lessen the pain with Current: A News Project.

Through a combination of data from Google Hot Trends and cross-references via Google News, the last 24 hours of memes are charted over time. The focus is on providing a tool that allows journalists to report news that matters, without sacrificing the reader traffic that comes in for videos of cute puppy dogs.

News relies on soft stories like horoscopes, celebrity gossip and restaurant reviews to subsidize the important but less sensational stories that keep democracy running. At base, any solution to News’ present problems must address the balance between the hard news we need and the soft news that drives advertising dollars. By visually anthropomorphizing the capricious nature of public attention Current can spotlight these missed opportunities in news coverage.

It’s still rough around the edges, and I’m not really digging the whole amoeba aesthetic, but I could see how this might be useful. Next steps: provide a way to focus on specific topics, incorporate Twitter trends, and smooth out the interaction.

Try it out for yourself (available for Mac and PC), and toss your thoughts in the comments below.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

I’m having more fun putting random stuff into graphs than I care to admit, but it’s my prerogative, and I can do what I want, so ha. In something of a Data Underload, special edition, I played with famous science fiction quotes for Sci Fi Wire. My favorite is obviously from Back to the Future, the greatest movie of all time. Check out the rest at Sci Fi.