I See What You Mean

Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis have a wonderful interactive timeline on milestones in the theory and practice of data visualization. Be prepared to spend a lot of time there; it's a deep well. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization

My New Year's gift to all y'all is this recommendation: RUN DON'T WALK to download  Google Refine . (No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.) Refine is an app that expedites data cleaning, thereby eliminating hours and hours of tedium and letting me get to the fun parts of the project sooner. Google Refine I will certainly be putting it through its paces this year.  If you do check it out, let me know what you think.

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.

The auteur of Information is Beautiful has created a wry visualization of Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars (excerpted above). It is a thing of beauty.

Data nerds like me will enjoy wallowing in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series , a massive collection of U.S. Census microdata that's been made available to anyone for social and economic research. From the website : IPUMS-USA is a project dedicated to collecting and distributing United States census data. Its goals are to: Collect and preserve data and documentation Harmonize data Disseminate the data absolutely free! We are cautioned to "use it for GOOD -- never for EVIL." 'Nuff said. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation , Sun Microsystems , the University of Minnesota and the National Institutes of Health .

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!

The ever-astute Lorelei Brown hips us to the "astounding data visualization critiques" at Graphic Sociology . That's one for the blogroll.

Another in our occasional series on Where The Numbers Come From : What more could the aspiring info-interpreter want than a Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network ? Hosted/maintained/curated by the folks at the Open Knowledge Forum , it provides more than 350 data "packages" (from the Airborne Antarctic Ozone Experiment to Yosemite National Park ) and code that are "free for anyone to use and reuse." Some packages contain video or podcasts, others static images, still others scientific data. The mix of media means there's something to entice analysts of all bents. For my part, since I am a lifelong Bardbrain (I once wrote a thesis on metaphorical structure in the language of Shakespeare's plays), I find this subsite especially intriguing. I'll try to whip up a Shakespeare-related visualization and post it here soon.

The Sunlight Foundation resources page lists two dozen "insanely useful" sites that aim to "provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics." It's a handy list that's worth bookmarking .

As someone who deeply appreciates raw data and admires those who wrangle it, I have to give a shoutout to my fellow travelers out there: Big bunches of ripe bananas to the primates over at Infochimps , "a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table—things like a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing." Check out the (still small but interesting) visualization gallery . Numbrary , whose name is self-explanatory, is "a free online service dedicated to finding, using and sharing numbers on the web." At present its focus seems to be financial and demographic, with info from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System , U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis , U.S. Census Bureau , the SEC EDGAR Database and CIA - The World Factbook . Swivel , which aims to "make it easy for eve