In: Employment Environment/weather Finance Global Economy Interactive
3 Feb 2012The World Economic Forum always has some interesting visualizations and info-videos.
Global Risk Map:
Interactive Risk Explorer (be sure to play with the menu tabs on the right):
In: Graphic Design (general) Graphic Tools Innovative Interactive Maps
2 Feb 2012This is an example of why you keep checking back on mediocre data visualization tools. The last time I looked at the OECD’s explorer, it was slow, kinda clunky, and not very innovative. This morning I took another look. Wow! It has interactive choropleth maps, motion scatter plots, profile plots, time graphs, and cool histogram tools – and all of them have excellent filters and fine tuning controls, can be viewed over time, are smoothly animated and you’re allowed to load your own data.
But wait! There’s more! MUCH more! It turns out the explorer is just one tool created by the Swedish National Center for Visual Analytics (NCVA), who have constructed a set of Geovisual Analytics Visualization (GAV) Flash tools, including what you need to create your own statistics explorer. The NCVA also has a spin-off company that sells a desktop version of the explorer, a Flow Map explorer that draws proportionate arrows on maps to track flows, and a multi-dimensional explorer (which I only played with a little – but is very very cool).
Check out the scatter tables in the MDIM as a way to select data in the other two panels:
I’m almost embarrassed I haven’t seen these before. On the other hand, I love that there is such innovation going on – all the time.
Aesthetically this is obviously quite nice. The roll-over data is snappy quick. The color selection is clear and intuitive. But there’s something about these nested arc charts that I just don’t like – they don’t seem like a very good way to illustrate historical data. It was created as a simple example of the Axiis data visualization framework – which offers several other Flex based graphic tools. (Hat tip to Ryan C for sending this along!)
In: Interactive Maps Politics
23 Jan 2012This FT map illustrates just how packed things are at the Persian Gulf’s bottleneck. The designers wisely chose to allow viewers to select which layers of information they wanted to see, and also provided useful related information as popups.
Here is the map with all layers turned on – which obviously would have been a disaster without the interactive filtering.
(note: some FT features require a subscription to view)
I’ve loved these types of charts since I first saw them used for insight into the Arab Spring discontent. What’s great about the version linked below is the country coverage that Worldlifeexpectancy.com has managed to pull together – it’s very impressive. If you wander the site, there are a lot of additional maps and charts on global causes of death, life expectancy, and other fun demographic topics. (via)
On a design note: Wow. I haven’t seen someone attempt a black background and glowing neon fonts in such a manner since the earliest days of the internet. I don’t know whether to applaud the boldness and bust out some glowsticks, or put on sunglasses to prevent a seizure. I suppose since it’s all about death, the black kinda works.
The Fortune Magazine website for this study has lots of related articles and indicators. My favorite it the interactive “Perkfinder” – you select the benefits most important to you, and it tells you which of the top 100 companies provide them:
A treemap of the jobs that the 1% are doing – showing a lot of variety. I wish there was more detail about the dataset source. The related article provides some anecdotal examples.
In: Culture Employment Interactive Maps Source: NYT US Economy
17 Jan 2012Enter your household income and see where you rank in 344 areas around the country:
There’s some interesting behind the scenes information on the news paper version here:
Answer a series of 11 questions to see which presidential candidate’s views are most like your own. At the end, you can also roll over each candidates columns to see what their specific positions are. Personally, I thought some of the questions were slanted and missing answers that fit my beliefs – no shock, I suppose, considering they had to fit the answers to candidate platforms.
I went to the Newseum this weekend (a great museum – recommend it to everyone) and saw the below wall sized map of freedom of the press. The online version of it isn’t much to look at, but the pop-up/drill down information for each country is very rich.
Online version (which was also available at the Museum at the kiosks you see above):
The Post is doing a great job visualizing the election so far, with a number of clear tools that they are keeping very up to date.
First up: Maps and interactive filtering of spending on ads, including videos of the ads themselves:
A Primary Tracker: mapping out candidate visits, “pre-game analysis”, results by county, and “post-game analysis” – for EACH state!
And a campaign finance explorer:
They also have something called the @MentionMachine that supposedly tracks candidates by twitter mentions and other media references that you can drill down through. Unfortunately, it isn’t working for me on either Firefox or IE.
Who has some of the coolest data around? NASA, of course. While you can dig around their numerous websites looking for gems, they have pulled together many of their best work into a free iPad App. The quality of the visualizations is incredible, and most of them are well annotated/narrated. They add 8-10 new visualizations each month.
Here are stills from some of the videos:
Wind currents:
Ocean currents:
Snow cover:
Carbon absorption:
In: Graphic Design (bad) Interactive Maps Politics Source: Washington Post Source: WSJ
19 Dec 2011There are a lot of these graphs out there. What I like about this presentation from the WSJ is that each dot in each bar can be clicked on for a short biography of the person who died – a nice combination of information and gravitas.
CNN’s tool maps out where they came from and where they died, and provides an area for others to leave memories for each fallen. While information rich, this one felt very sterile to me, and I couldn’t find anyone that had the “memories” section filled in.
The NYT’s went strangely artsy, with a digitized mosaic menu of the fallen’s faces:
The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen feature does a good job of presenting summary information, as well as photos of each soldier:
And the Huffington post comes up with the least interactive, self-identified as interactive (ALL CAPS IN THE TITLE!!!), series of charts I’ve even seen. Pretty sad.
The Washington Post added family type to it’s interactive map of census data (the map also allows you to filter over time, race, density, etc). You can zoom in and see how your county compares to the rest of the country. Interesting observations: Married people with children only make up 7% of Washington DC?!? Utah is one of the few remaining regions with high “married w/children” percentages, compared to previous years when it was more common across the country.
Just 51 percent of all adults who are 18 and older are married, placing them on the brink of becoming a minority, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census statistics to be released Wednesday. That represents a steep drop from 57 percent who were married in 2000… In 1960, for example, when most baby boomers were children, 72 percent of all adults were married. The median age for brides was barely 20, and the grooms were just a couple of years older. (related article)
An interesting comparison of state primary and caucus dates 2000-2012, both for the Democrats and Republicans. You can watch Iowa and New Hampshire keep moving back the opening day to stay before other states trying to steal the spotlight. The bad news: Super Tuesday isn’t until March 6th – so we have 3 more months to go of lame media coverage of the Republican field.
An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps, and interactive data visualization toys -- on topics from around the world.