The earth recently passed a huge milestone: an estimated 7 billion people now inhabit our home planet. That number is nothing to blink an eye at, yet most maps displaying the population of the world make little visual reverence to how astounding that mass of people really appears: enter a new map called Dencity. [Read more...]
As Chris McDowall rode the Auckland Public Transportation system in his home of New Zealand, he often imagined how all the busses, trains and ferries would appear carving their daily path from above. He would try to visualize the varied trajectories of each vehicle as they zig-zagged through the complex network… and it’s no surprise that he admits, “after a few moments I would get hopelessly overwhelmed and go back to reading my book.” Thankfully for McDowall and the rest of us, Auckland Transport published its Google Transit Feed data to MAXX, giving all the information needed to create an animated visualization of the network over a typical busy Monday. [Read more...]
Stefanie Posavec is one unique and extremely talented designer. Her personal works focus on some very unusual subjects too, analyzing the structure of books or mathematical division, and most unusually doing much of the work by hand with pen and paper. The more one knows about her complex projects, the more interesting and beautiful they become [Read more...]
If you’ve ever wondered about the popularity of topics through time, this new interactive archive of Popular Science magazine is just the thing. With the help of a team at Google, the entire catalog of 1,563 Popular Science issues starting at the magazines inception in 1872 has been archived, creating a set of mineable data totaling 1.35-gigabytes. By using both a visual calendar and a circular animation of dates, users of the new Archive Explorer can see when words and terms were popular based on the number of times they appeared in that month issue. Especially interesting is observing when words like “internet” and “communist” came into use. Check it out for yourself at popsci.com [Read more...]
Just what do our emotions look like? It’s a simple question with extremely complex answers. Emotionally Vague, an interesting and extensive project to graphically display how our emotions look and feel in our body, surveyed 35 different countries to get to the bottom of the question [Read more...]
The last time we mentioned Alexander Chen he had converted the New York subway map into an interactive stringed instrument. Continuing the musical theme, he’s now taken the iconic prelude to Bach’s Cello Suites No. 1 and made an interactive visualization you can mess around with until the tune’s completely “Baroque.” The orbiting dots pluck the strings, like a rotating music box. You can grab and throw the nodes off track using your pointer, then watch as they slowly regain their orbit and the tune its rhythm. See the video at the bottom or head to Baroque.me to play with history [Read more...]
The world population was just 1 billion people in 1804, but now just two centuries later the people count on our planet has reached an astounding 7 billion. What has contributed to this exponential and dramatic increase, and what does it mean for us in the future? As this video and related article by NPR cleverly explores, the causes are far simpler than the solutions. What will our population reach in the next 100 years? [Read more...]
Personally, I believe that tracking the journey of public data in social networks is going to be a big trend in the near future. We will be able to track a piece of content (posts, images, videos, etc.), from its genesis to its multiple paths on public platforms like Twitter and Google Plus, seeing who connects with it, changes it or spreads it. TinEye, Google’s Search by Image, YouTube’s “this video was seen on” notice and now Google Ripples are great ways to track the path of a popular idea [Read more...]
Death and Taxes is a behemoth graph of the federal budget. Containing 500 of the largest programs and departments, nearly all that receive over 200 million dollars each year, the graphic gives us a revealing look at where the U.S. puts its financial priorities.
Created using data from the president’s 2012 budget proposal, Jess Bachman spends a few months each year creating a new edition to keep us up to date. All of the program circles are proportional in size to their funding levels and for comparison the percentage change from both 2012 and 2002 is included so you can identify trends. For a full sized, zoomable view, or to purchase the yearly poster, head to deathandtaxesposter.com [Read more...]
The vintners at Australian winery Between Five Bells, have a very unique take on how to market a wine, giving buyers much more than simply a finely aged beverage. One thing that makes them stand out is their adherence to a policy of “transparency in winemaking;” meaning they share much of the recipe and growing conditions of their wine. In fact, long before knowing what to do with the data on their new 2010 Geelong Red, they kept careful notes on the conditions of vineyards, vintage conditions, ferments and finished wines. That knowledge has now been passed on to their customers in another unique move: labeling their new wine with a detailed infographic sharing the information. [Read more...]
