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.

The Washington Post used an interactive slider design on their map to let you flip between views of 1990 and 2012:

You can view static and interactive versions at the USDA site, as well as download the dataset.

Mapping the earth is a classic problem. For thousands of years cartographers, mathematicians, and inventors have come up with methods to map the curved surface of the earth to a flat plane. The main problem is that you cannot do this perfectly, such that both the shape and size of the surface are depicted properly everywhere. This has intrigued me for a long time. Why not just take a map of a small part of the earth, which is almost perfect, glue neighboring maps to it, and repeat this until the whole earth is shown? Of course you get interrupts, but does this matter? What does such a map look like? To check this out, we developed myriahedral projections.

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)

There’s some interesting behind the scenes information on the news paper version here:

(via FlowingData)

Online version (which was also available at the Museum at the kiosks you see above):

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.

Here are stills from some of the videos:

Wind currents:

Ocean currents:

Snow cover:

Carbon absorption:

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.