I See What You Mean

Check out Lauren Manning's installation/survey about data visualization methods. She has created and mounted 40-odd versions of a big yet easy-to-understand data set. Viewers can show her which versions attracted them most strongly, got them thinking, and so forth by marking up "experience cards" that show the array in miniature. My own faves tend to be those that illustrate the proportions of different foods in fresh ways (mostly in the Abstract/Complex quadrant of her matrix ), rather than just showing images and labeling them with numbers (the Simple/Literal quadrant). Among those I like best: Food by Line Weight Concentric Circles Shaded Box Chart Stacked Bar Chart and Mini Months At the same time, I found a few of the formats hard to grasp; one such is the Rainbow Diagram Full Circle . I don't understand the purpose of the connections or the meaning of the line width. It needs a legend, at the very least. Still, the photoset/installation...

Eloquent yet immediately comprehensible. A dead-simple concept that illustrates a great truth. Because it is based on extremely solid data -- geographic size, which is as close to actual fact as we can get -- the result is inarguable. Exemplary.

See it now. Based on the recent Wikileaks release of military documents , Mike Dewar and Drew Conway created this animated month-by-month infographic showing the number and location of engagements over five years in Afghanistan. Beautiful work and very sobering. Animated Heatmap of WikiLeaks Report Intensity in Afghanistan - Zero Intelligence Agents

At his blog Junk Charts , statistics jock Kaiser Fung cleans up the clunkers. And very well too , I might add. Here's a revamp he did of an eyecatching-but-not-very-useful graphic depicting Americans' changes in religious affiliation (data via Pew ). I like his clever format, with the arrows pointing in all directions. However, at some point a data set is too small to be worth visualizing, per Tufte, and should be displayed as a table instead. Here, ET does a rethink of a statistical table that molds the numbers into an elegant and useful hybrid, a "table-graphic." I wondered if a hybridized display would work well for the Pew data set, so I gave it a try. Usefully simple, or too simplistic? Comments welcomed.

Presenting headline news (via Google ) in the age of information visualization. This is Newsmap , created by Marcos Weskamp , a Bay Area design engineer who does infoviz and interaction design. Here's how this treemap works: As you mouse over each box, a callout pops up containing that story's first few sentences. Across the top are the different countries you can focus on, or you can select all for a worldwide sample. In the lower right corner are tabs corresponding to different newspaper sections (the colors of which are reflected in the map); again, you can customize the newsmap to suit your interests. Bravo, Marcos.

Jess Bachman of Wallstats.com , creator of the well-known Death and Taxes poster, has turned his eye to the U.S. government's unemployment statistics. Back in January he published a flowchart clarifying how the government determines who is officially Unemployed and who is merely overlooked. ( Here's how that determination is described verbally by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) What's more, the official numbers have gone up since January. As of the end of June, the official figure is 9.5 percent. Has the Obama administration come up with a new tally to include all the undercounted (I hope)? Or are things just going to hell in a handbasket (I fear)? Click here to see the whole thing. Nice work, Jess.

Portuguese infoviz enthusiast Jorge Camoes has spent the last year and a half writing informed, insightful blog posts on the field, complete with examples and citations. To his credit, he approaches everything -- even the revered work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few -- with loving skepticism. I'm gratified, too, that he seems to agree with me on one central point: Snazzy tools alone don't get you good data visualization. It all comes down to putting serious thought into the project before you plot the first data point. In future posts we'll discuss more of Jorge's ideas. Bem feito, o Sr. Camoes!

San Diego digital artist Tim Schwartz tracked the prevalence of certain words in 158 years of the New York Times and then, rather than create animation or static graphs (too mainstream?), he used that data to power his amusingly retro Command Center (above). Check out those analog gauges and the LED time display! Even the biomorphic shape harks back to a low-tech era. Lovely work, Tim. Playful projects like this give me tremendous hope that soon data visualization will be understood, accepted and even adopted by average folks.

Appointed earlier this week by President Obama, 34-year-old Vivek Kundra is the U.S.'s new Chief Information Officer. Since 2007, Kundra’s group in the DC municipal government [where he had been CTO] has been using a data-visualization package from Tableau Software... Kundra’s group [created] charts and graphs for its CapStat program, which has received a fair bit of attention as a way to present trends and analysis to the general public on municipal issues like crime, disaster response, school security, and city maintenance. The program is one of the ways in which Kundra has been recognized in his efforts to make the workings of the DC government more transparent... Obama’s hope is that Kundra will also help bring more transparency to the federal government. One way this could potentially happen is through websites like Recovery.gov , which was set up to explain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The intent of the site is to show how, when, and where money from the fed...