Yesterday was the Interactive Infographics panel at South by Southwest, and if Twitter is any indication of how it went, I’d say the panel had a captivated audience. I wouldn’t expect anything less from the four panelists, Ben Fry (Processing), Shan Carter (NYT), Casey Caplowe (Good), and Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen)

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to attend, but luckily I was able to follow the play-by-play on Livefyre (sort of a cross between chat and forum) along with some excellent notes from @jpmarcum and @bryanconnor. Here are the important bits I was able to glean.

The bulk of the time was spent showcasing the work from the four groups. I think you can find most of the projects through FlowingData. Just use the search form on the bottom right of this page. The good stuff came towards the end during the Q&A.
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Designer Christopher Harrell talks about, with a dose of various embedded graphics, pointing your skills toward something good. Harrell’s video was one of the winners in the What Matters to You scholarship competition for Vancouver Film School. It looks like home video, but that just adds to the charm.
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In 1870, Francis Walker oversaw publication of the United States’ first Statistical Atlas, based on data from the ninth Census. It was a big moment for statistics in the United States as the atlas provided a way to compare data on a national level using maps and statistical graphics.

What continues to amaze me about these old illustrations is the detail – all done by hand. That’s ridiculous. The kicker is that a lot of this stuff looks way better than a lot of what we see nowadays. Here are some selections from the 1870 atlas.
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If people put data on the Web – government data, scientific data, community data – whatever it is, it will be used by other people to do wonderful things in ways they never could have imagined.

— Tim Berners-Lee, TED, February 2010

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, comes back to TED a year after his call for open, structured data with a quick update. Spoiler alert: things are looking good – and they’re only going to get a lot better. But you already knew that, right?
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How to split up the US – Geographic clusters based on social network connections on Facebook. [thx, przemek]

Rise of the Infogeeks – Lots of graphic designers have taken a liking to information graphics.

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) gives augmented reality a go – Point your iPhone at the station and get info on when the next train is coming.

Google Public Data Explorer – Trying to get more mileage out of the Trendalyzer acquisition. [thx, eric]

Here’s the idea. The government recommends a diet for healthy living (right pyramid), but at the same time there are billions of dollars of lopsided subsidies (left pyramid) whose distribution doesn’t look anything like the former. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) used the above 3-d pyramids to present this information.

Interesting point. Funky presentation. Discuss (remakes highly recommended).

[via The Consumerist]

The opening page of We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion reads a quote from “a woman in Maine.” It sets the stage for the rest of the book.

I have a problem I’m sure many other bloggers face: I am perfectly comfortable sharing intimate details about my emotions with complete strangers I meet online but shy away from expressing my true feelings to anyone I know in real life.

For those unfamiliar, We Feel Fine is a project from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that’s been online since 2006. At its core, the goal is to show the emotions of the authors behind millions of blog posts on the Web by looking for sentences that start with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” It’s an interactive artwork “authored by everyone.”
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In a follow up to his McDonald’s map, Stephen Von Worley of Weather Sealed maps the dominating burger chains across the United States. McDonald’s obviously has a stronghold in a lot of areas but not all of them. Most noticeable is Sonic Drive-in with over 900 restaurants in Texas alone. Personally, I’m rooting for Carl’s Jr. and In-n-Out.

[via We Love Datavis]

EPCOR, the water utility company that runs the fountains up in Edmonton, Canada released this graph yesterday. It’s water consumption during the Olympic gold medal hockey game, overlaying consumption of the previous day. How much do Canadians love their hockey? A lot.

The first period ends. Time to pee. The second period ends. Time to pee. The third period ends. Time to pee. Consumption goes way down when Canada wins and during the medal ceremony.

Finally, when it’s all said and done, the rest of the country can relieve itself, figuratively and literally.

[via contrarian | thanks, @statpumpkin]

In an effort to put transit data from the Toronto Transit Committee to better use, MyTTC provides a trip planner to help you find the best route from point A to point B. This video, compete with smart arses sitting on a couch, provides a peek into how the underlying algorithm works.

[Thanks, Canna]

Big news for all you Edward Tufte fanboys and girls. He will be joining the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel who will advise The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. The Board’s purpose is to track and explain how the $787 billion in stimulus funds is being put to use.

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

Whether Tufte will have a direct impact on graphs like these, I’m not so sure, but it certainly won’t hurt. I mean the man does know a thing or two about dispersing information.

[Thanks, Yuri and @tbeauchamp]

Footprints – Every building footprint, and nothing else, in Montgomery County, Ohio. It’s interesting how buildings can define an area.

Data, data everywhere – The Economist reports on the explosion of big data and the challenges that come with it.

Q&A With Shawn Allen of Stamen Design – Always interesting to hear from these guys [thx, tim].

The Case For An Older Woman – Another thoughtful analysis from the okcupid group on why men should be more open-minded to dating older women.

There’s this article on CNN, from The Frisky, that has this little theory about who is most likely to win the Oscar for best actor:

[T]he Oscar generally goes to the dude who has the most best actor and best supporting nominations under his belt already.

That seemed like a curious statement. Didn’t Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jaimie Foxx recently win on their first nominations for the coveted award? Okay, so Hoffman was actually up against a bunch of other newbies, but what about the rest?

Only 10 out of the past 29 winners, or just over a third, had the most nominations their year. Take a look at the data since 1980. Is the theory valid? You decide.
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It was a good month for FlowingData. We passed the 30k-reader mark, and I think this past month was an all-time high for pageviews. Thanks again. everyone for reading and sharing FlowingData.

I also managed to switch servers (semi-) successfully while updating the FD homepage in the process. Make sure you check that out if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think in the comments.

In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from last month ranked by a combination of views, comments, and trackbacks. I especially enjoyed a lot of the thoughtful discussion that came out of these posts.

1. Track Mouse Activity On Your Computer
2. How a Giant Shark Took Down an Airplane
3. Data Underload #9 – Big Graphic Blueprint
4. Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores
5. Excessively Labeled Airplane Tells You Where the Big Cheese Sits
6. Think like a statistician – without the math
7. Road to Recovery – Is the Recovery Act working?
8. Data Underload #8 – Unsolicited
9. An Easy Way to Make a Treemap
10. Challenge: make this graph easier to read

From the Forums

There was also some good stuff going on in the forums with a couple of job postings and some data goodies.

Data Visualization Guru – Energy group EnergyHub is looking for someone who can help visualize their data.

Interactive Data Visualization help needed – So is FrogDesign, but for a smaller project.

Visual Architects Contest – Do you have what it takes to win?

WinterOlympicMedals – The Olympics are over, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop playing with several decades of medal data [thanks, annie]

Simple yet effective. Any questions? [via 9gag | Thanks, Barry]

Frederik Seiffert provides this nifty tool, LastHistory, to visualize your Last.fm listening history. Mouse over songs and find repeated track sequences. The visualization itself isn’t all that useful, but it gets interesting when you hook your calendar and photos in with music. LastHistory lets you replay songs synched with your photos, and your slideshow suddenly gains a new dimension.
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FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

Of course there are plenty of possible explanations for the distribution. Maybe people get all their food from superstores like Walmart in the red dot areas, so there are fewer gigantic stores than there are small local bars.

Then again, the FloatingSheep guys did their homework and found, according to Census, that the number of drinking places in those red dots are really skewed compare to the average. So it’s also possible that area of the country just likes to drink a lot.

Anyone who lives in the area care to confirm? I expect your comment to be filled with typos and make very little sense. And maybe smell like garbage.

[Thanks, Michael]