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):
In: Graphic Design (general) Interactive News Media Politics
4 May 2011There were so many of these last month I stopped looking at them – but this one is cute. Yes, I said cute. It’s an interactive flying timeline of protest milestones for 17 countries. Click on any of them to bring up a full Guardian article. They are also keeping it up to date (as of today, anyway).
Ughhh. Type in your zip code and see how close you are to a nuclear plant!! There’s even a red target painted on the reactor!!! I’m primarily posting this so I have an excuse to link to this excellent article, which explains in detail what’s going on in Japan and why you shouldn’t run out to buy potassium pills and start digging a fallout shelter. I might also point out that we conducted 140+ atmospheric atomic tests in Nevada – I’m not saying that was a particularly intelligent or healthy thing to do, but let’s maintain a little perspective about fallout risks, shall we?
It’s surprising to me how often the organizations who create the data are so rarely the ones who take the time to visualize it properly <cough! US Government Cough!>. However in the below example TV habit watchdog nielsen has done a fine job of summing up the television and mobile phone markets. (via)
Excellent article by Sarah Slobin (who has worked for NYT, Fortune, CNN, WSJ, etc) on how to research and design your own work. (via)

In: Interactive Maps News Media Politics Source: Washington Post Updated regularly
6 May 2010The Washington Post’s new “Post Politics” online section has an excellent map of elections (Senate, House, and Governor), all updated regularly. Click around for a while – there are a large number of filters, drill downs, and highlights to play with.
Pew Research has created an interactive filter of 2009 news coverage that graphs results by media outlet and topic. It’s a little confusing at first, but fun to play with. For example, below, you can compare Fox and NPRs coverage of several issues. Note: I had to disable Firefox’s ad-blocker to view it. (via)
Popular Science magazine has partnered with Google to make available it’s entire archive. Keyword searches bring up an entire month/issue with your search result highlighted. It looks they have OCR’d every page, making for some cool search results. (via)
For example, a search of “map” brought up this map of US science sites from 1967:
and this first air-map of the north pole from 1931:
“Chart” brings up radiological diagrams from 1950 (among many many others)
Interactive timeline of approval since inauguration. Some dates are annotated. Apparently the Guardian used the Real Clear Politics rating (2nd chart), which is an average of many different polls – nice! And while we’re at it, USAToday’s Approval Tracker allows you to compare presidents’ ratings since Truman and is updated regularly.
The infamous election maps begin to spawn… This one includes fairly detailed analysis of the close races.
An addictive collection of beautiful charts, graphs, maps, and interactive data visualization toys -- on topics from around the world.