Aaron Koblin (along with Chris Milk) is up to his crowdsourcing mischief again. It started with sheep, then the dollar bill, to a bicycle built for two, and now the Johnny Cash Project. Along the same lines of Aaron’s other projects, viewers are invited to draw an individual frame to the tune of Ain’t No Grave. In the end, drawings are put together to create a whole new music video for the song. Select any illustrated frame to watch a person’s drawing session.
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A recent study [pdf] by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman at HP Labs found that it’s possible to use Twitter chatter to predict first-weekend box office revenues simply based on volume of tweets. The predictions were even more accurate when they introduced sentiment analysis (i.e. classified tweets as positive or negative).
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If you absolutely refuse to touch any code, I suggest Many Eyes or one of the fine FD sponsors, but if you’re looking to get your hands dirty, Processing is a great place to start.

Jer Thorp, whose work we saw not too long ago, posts this introduction tutorial for data visualization with Processing.

I’m going to start from scratch, work through some examples, and (hopefully) make some interesting stuff. One of the nice things, I think, about this process, is that we’re going to start with fresh, new data – I’m not sure what kind of things we’re going to find once we start to get our hands dirty. This is what is really exciting about data visualization; the chance to find answers to your own, possibly novel questions.

The examples are straightforward, the results are interesting, and most importantly, it gives you a lot to work off of with your own data and geometry. Hopefully it’s the first post of many.

Designer Tiago Cabaco explains the conception of wine in this short animated infographic. Some of the effects, like the frame rotation, are a little overused. It actually made me a little dizzy, but it’s short. Still fun to watch.
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Big news. Former IBMers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg just announced their new venture Flowing Media (no relation to FlowingData), a consultancy focused on visualization for consumers and mass audiences.

Those who read FD probably already know of the duo, but for those who don’t, I’m sure you’ve seen some of their work. They sit somewhere in between the art/design and technical side of visualization, which always provides for interesting results. I highly recommend them if you’re in need of some viz help. Needless to say, I’m a fan.

Seeing a trend?

This comes just a few months after Ben Fry’s decision to also venture out on his own (after being with Seed for a year). Like Fernanda and Martin, he’s also in Cambridge, interestingly enough. There must be something in the water over there.

If anything, this is yet another indicator of the growing popularity of data, and more importantly, a desire to do something with it. I’m totally guessing here, but I bet Fernanda and Martin’s inbox was chock-full of project possibilities/offers, which I’m sure played a big role in their decision.

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the opportunities out there after I graduate. It’s a great time for data scientists.

Designer Juan Pablo Bravo illustrates 100 Pixar characters to scale, from Wally B. and Luxo Jr. to Wall E. and Lotso, from the upcoming Toy Story 3. Main characters are highlighted in yellow. Catch the full giganto version of the graphic on Flickr.
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With the 2010 UK elections coming up, the Guardian explores possible outcomes, given a certain amount of swing votes. Three views are provided: a grid map (above), your traditional geographic map, and a bar chart. You can select a region of interest, and it stays highlighted as you switch between the options.
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March was a really good month for FlowingData. Thanks again everyone for sending me link suggestions, sharing on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc, and just being all-around cool readers.

In case you missed them, here are the top posts from March, based on a combination of pageviews and comments.

1. Data Underload #12 – Famous Movie Quotes
2. Challenge: Let’s do something with these 3-D pyramids
3. Think like a statistician – without the math
4. Canada: the country that pees together stays together
5. Mapping GitHub – a network of collaborative coders
6. Japan, the strange country, in motion graphics
7. Powerpoint and dying kittens
8. How Genetics Works
9. Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first
10. What burger chain reigns supreme?

From the Forums

There’s also some good stuff from the FD forums.

• Data Visualization Freelance Job – two-week gig in NYC for heartbeat digital.
• Health information design with geographic skills – another job opening.
• Infographic Designer/Illustrator Needed – noticing a trend here?
• Data analysis on elections and targeting for the DNC
• Minard redesign competition – remake the classic graphic. Win some posters.

If you’ve got job openings or data-related events, feel free to post your links there. And of course you’re always welcome to ask data visualization questions there too.

Matthew Bloch, Ford Fessenden, and Shan Carter continue the New York Times geographic sexiness with their recent interactive, mapping taxi flow across Manhattan over time. The scroll up top lets you move through times of the week, or just press play and watch it go. You can also roll over blocks to see rides per hour.
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Affording Health Care – Some weirdness going on with the area chart on the curve of the leg, but I like the aesthetic of the graphic overall.

Wolfram Alpha shifts focus to ubiquity – Lowered iPhone app price by 96% and brought back mobile version of website.

State of Twitter Spam – With lots of users comes more bad ones. Luckily Twitter has been making good steps forward.

FollowTheMoney – Updated so you can easily download all contribution records for your state, local officials, or committees. Create an account or sign in via Facebook.

P.S. Happy Easter!

Edward Tufte was officially appointed to a White House advisory role a few weeks ago. Tufte, along with other experts like Ben Shneiderman, have been providing input for the last year or so.

Tufte has a short chat (embedded below) with On the Media about what’s been going on with Recovery.gov. The main point: report data like The New York Times.

The first thing I said about a year ago when I met with them for the first time is that their model should be a first-rate news website… Once we got the news metaphor and got the intense mapping, that’s halfway there. I wouldn’t give it an A yet. There’s, you know, still a ways to go, and I know some of them, and I hope to, you know, find a few more.

Once Recovery.gov is further along, hopefully other government organizations follow suit, starting with Data.gov…or maybe Census…or the Bureau of Labor Statistics…or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

Listen to the six-minute interview below.
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Location-aware apps are the hot topic nowadays, and with all the tech-oriented people congregating at South by Southwest, there was a whole lot of checking-in to be done, especially with all the parties and get-togethers. Everyone wanted to know where everyone else was at.

SimpleGeo scraped the location stream, which was available on vicarious.ly, and mapped the check-ins over time.

I didn’t spot any particularly interesting patterns other than the occasional bar-hopping, but still fun to watch. Looks like Foursquare leads, with Gowalla taking a big chunk too.

To be honest, I still feel kind of uneasy about the whole location-sharing thing. Anyone care to share their experience?

[Thanks @mrflip]

As you know, there’s this big wave of transparency going on right now, and many organizations want to do more than just post a bunch of spreadsheets. They actually want to visualize it and share their data in a way that can be consumed by the general public. InstantAtlas aims to make that easy – without any code.
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Some people love ’em and others hate ’em. Now you can play with streamgraphs (seen here and here) yourself, whatever side you might be on. Lee Byron has made the code available on Github, under a BSD license.

It’s in Processing, and it’s not plug-n-play like many of you are probably hoping for, but on a quick skim, the code does look very readable and shouldn’t be too hard to grasp for those with a little bit of coding knowledge. I recommend reading Lee and Martin’s streamgraph paper first though.

March 22 was World Water Day, and TreeHugger posted this graphic on drinking water that is available in the world. The main point is that a very small percentage of water in the world is actually drinkable. It’s definitely a story worth telling, but the graphic doesn’t work at all. Even as a simple presentation of percentages (from UN-Water Statistics), it’s confusing.

How can we improve this graphic to tell the story more clearly? Discuss.

[Thanks, Donald]

GitHub is a large community where coders can collaborate on software development projects. People check code in and out, make edits, etc. Franck Cuny maps this community (with Gephi), based on information in thousands of user profiles.
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Design student Kenichi Tanaka animates the history of Japan for his final thesis project.

He pokes fun at his culture a little bit there in the beginning, yeah? I feel like something is getting lost in translation.

Update: The English version was taken down, unfortunately. Here’s the original Japanese version. The graphics are still in English, so you can probably understand most of it without the narration.

[Thanks, @pims]