Data artists: Visualisation as a gateway drug From erogenous zones to sock drawers, gurus of data visualisation Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas tell Peter Aldhous about the science and art of democratising data You present data sets in a variety of visual ways. Is your work art, information science, design or something else? Martin Wattenberg: We don't stress about labels. Fernanda Viégas: It's more about revealing the interesting patterns in data. (Image: Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas) Your Many Eyes project provided tools for people to upload and visualise their own data sets. MW: We are not there yet, but I am optimistic we will make it. Visualisation is a gateway drug to statistics. FV: One of the things that gave me hope when we launched Many Eyes was to see kids using it. Can data visualisation tell stories that have never been told? MW: Sure. One example is a visualisation called History Flow, which shows individuals' editing histories on Wikipedia. Are these moments of revelation contagious?
Public Data Explorer Eurostat, Indicateurs démographiques Eurostat Indicateurs démographiques annuels. Chômage en Europe (données mensuelles) données sur le chômage harmonisé pour les pays européens. Salaire minimum en Europe Salaire mensuel brut minimum en euros ou parités de pouvoir d'achat, données semi-annuelles. Dette publique en Europe Statistiques sur les finances publiques des pays européens. Transport routier en Europe Statistiques du transport routier pour les pays européens. Urban Mobs
Todd Heisler/The New York Times CITY OF ANGLES The street grid gave developers and, later, tourists order, access and predictability. It has proved surprisingly resilient, accommodating motor vehicles and Central Park. Two hundred years ago on Tuesday, the city’s street commissioners certified the no-frills street matrix that heralded New York’s transformation into the City of Angles — the rigid 90-degree grid that spurred unprecedented development, gave birth to vehicular gridlock and defiant jaywalking, and spawned a new breed of entrepreneurs who would exponentially raise the value of Manhattan’s real estate. Today, debate endures about the grid, which mapped out 11 major avenues and 155 crosstown streets along which modern Manhattan would rise. The grid was the great leveler. “This is the purpose of New York’s geometry,” wrote Roland Barthes, the 20th-century French philosopher. The grid, which incorporated some existing roads, would also prove surprisingly resilient.
If we don't, remember me. Visualizations | Rock The Boat Marketing “And, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered…” If you’re in the online content business, such physical signs of positive reinforcement are hard to come by. But, know that what you do is appreciated and often celebrated. The following list contains 22 pieces of content. I cheered these gems when I learned about them at one point or another in 2013 and they've stood the test of as much as 12 months' time. As in previous Rock The Boat Marketing annual content highlights (last year’s), this is an idiosyncratic compilation across multiple digital marketing subject domains. Want to play along next year? 1. The results that Google presents to you the searcher are based on how it “understands” the words you type into the search engine. This excellent Vertical Measures graphic from April details what Google has in place to read your mind, and how that's evolving. 2. Part of being social is taking part in the broader community. 3. 4. 5. Marketers need to be more analytical. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Information is beautiful: The BBC-O-Gram Last week, the BBC cuts made all the headlines: it is closing two radio stations, capping spending on sports events, and slashing other costs. All to generate extra revenue for programming. As ever, it's a little hard to understand all the abstract figures from the BBC budget. Does the BBC give good value for money? What does it spend on Mad Men and other shows? How does its budget compare to other broadcasters? Hopefully the BBC-O-Gram will help put the figures in context. For more detail and extra figures, explore the data: About me I run the website InformationIsBeautiful.net, dedicated to visualising information, ideas, stories and data. My book of infographic exploria, Information Is Beautiful. World government data Search the world's government data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group or mail us at datastore@guardian.co.uk
the color of: an attempt to find out the color of anything What is the color of happiness? Now you have an objective answer with 'The Color Of' app. When you search for something, the app will grab pictures from Instagram and overlap them to form an abstract image with a dominant color, which you can share on Facebook and Twitter, save as your phone's wallpaper, or even send as a postcard. You can even explore the creations of other users. 'The Color Of' project adds on to the emerging field of new media and data art, where the work goes beyond a static medium by co-creating an art piece together with the user, the photo community and their ever-changing data. From its creation till today, thecolorof.com web experiment has over 300,000 visits.
Les séminaires Mitic - semitics jimdo page! vizLib pioneers data visualisation of library users - Library & Information Update blog Mapping of library use in Leicestershire – as part of the 5-month vizLib project – could lead to a revolution in library service improvement. The vizLib project crunched through 2.5m Talis records to turn them into maps that can be morphed and animated. This has opened up new dimensions on user data, that don't emerge from the numbers alone (though the short time-scale, and limited funding, mean that potential impacts on policy are not fully clear). A public workshop to present the project already has 40 people interested nationally (with some on its waiting list), without any advertising. The staff member behind this (unique?) “vizLib has given us an unprecedented understanding of the way in which the people of Leicestershire use our library services,” says Robert. “In a time when many public sector offerings are facing cut backs, research such as this is vital in ensuring that policy and funding support what citizens want, and that the standards of our provision remain high.”
Letters of Note Anagrammes de Métro Iván Skvarca m'a signalé un site Web proposant des cartes de métro dans lesquelles les noms de stations ont été remplacés par des anagrammes. S'étonnant que cela n'ait pas encore été effectué pour le métro parisien, il m'a suggéré de m'y lancer. En fait, Michel Clavel avait déjà anagrammatisé plusieurs portes de Paris dans son livre Paris en jeux paru fin 2005, et il m'a aussi informé que l'oulipienne Michelle Grangaud a publié en 1990 un recueil de poèmes anagrammatiques sur les stations du métro parisien. En 1999, elle a même présenté cinq de ses anagrammes comme s'il s'agissait d'un fragment de plan, et Alain Chevrier m'a appris que la RATP l'a affiché quelque temps dans le métro. Mais comme Nicolas Graner m'a aimablement (ou sadiquement !) Vous trouverez ci-dessous ma proposition de traduction, dans laquelle j'ai poussé le vice jusqu'à anagrammatiser également les stations de RER et de tramway. Retour à mes exercices oulipiens de début 2006 Gilles Esposito-Farèse <gef@iap.fr>
Infographic of the Day: Flow Chart of Obama's Health-Care Plan | Design & Innovation President Obama gets a lot of credit for mounting a presidential campaign--and government--that uses 21st century technologies in an unprecedented ways, from his online organizing and fund-raising efforts to his government transparency initiative. But he remains as musty as John Adams, in at least one respect: His insistence to use speeches alone, unaided by charts or graphs, to get his point across. As Ezra Klein, a health-care blogger for the Washington Post writes: Congressmen routinely use graphs to illustrate points in their floor speeches or arguments around legislation. Now, no one is suggesting that flow charts and graphs would have the power to define the debate. Why shouldn't last week's address to Congress have been accompanied by a couple charts? As Klein points out, Ross Perot gained tremendous momentum during his 1992 presidential run by using charts during presentations. Well, President Obama?