The data visualizations we found this week are extensive in their scope: a whole year in the life of a man, every recorded meteorite, all the Twitter relationships between the company’s employees. That much data is hard to sum up, so we’ll dive right in! After you’ve caught up on the best in this week’s information design, check out our past posts.
[Information Design] Felton’s 2012 Annual Report
It’s that time of year again! Nicholas Felton has released his annual report. To meticulously record his day-to-day activities this year, he used a custom-built iPhone app called Reporter. Each day at random intervals the app would send him reminders to fill in a short survey with data that formed the basis of his beautifully designed report. Check it out!
[Book] Map of the World
A fascinating collection of work by the new generation of map makers and illustrators that not only takes a look at more traditional forms of cartography, but also features an array of contemporary examples showcasing unique representations of this classic art form. Purchase your copy from Gestalten.
[Visualization] WIDE
The World Inequality Database on Education, created by Interactive Things (IXT), uses clean and simple visualizations to demonstrate how different circumstances, such as wealth, gender or location, impact the opportunities for education and life. A tremendous amount of data to explore.
[Visualization] Mapping Relationships of Twitter Employees
Using publicly available information, Santiago Ortiz created this incredibly detailed interactive network map of the relationships between every Twitter employee as determined by their Twitter conversations. The pink lines represent incoming Tweets, and the blue lines show the outgoing Tweets, with the circles sized by Tweet frequency.
[Visualization] Every Meteorite on Earth Mapped
Javier de la Torre, cofounder of CartoDB, used data from the Meteoritical Society to map every recorded meteorite impact going all the way back to 2,300 BCE. The interactive visualization allows the viewer to zoom to any location on Earth to see if a meteorite has fallen near there, when it fell and its size. Fascinating stuff!
[Information Design] Pop-up Budapest Infographics
Livia Hasenstaub combined simple paper-folding techniques with basic charts to create this delightful little pop-up book which visualizes data about her home city, Budapest.
[Tools] Word Tree
This handy web app takes your pasted text and generates a word tree. There is even a bookmarklet that allows you to transform any webpage into a rich word-based visualisation. Neat!
[Article] Visualization Makes Things Real
In this short read, Robert Kosara of Eager Eyes explains the importance of choosing the right visualization method to represent numbers and statistics — and how easy it can be to mislead the viewer by choosing the wrong one.
[Article] Pies vs. Slopes
Pie charts may be an attractive form of data presentation, but it’s certainly not the most efficient or useful. VizWiz takes a brief look at the benefits of using slope graphs as an alternative to the classic pie for ease of understanding and comparison.
