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This is a site that was developed at Pratt Institute in the SILS program.  The course was Programming for Cultural Heritage.  The MetEagle team sought to identify and indicate origin information, using linked and open data methods, of a selected number of galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We hope that patrons and users will be able to better understand and contextualize the geographic origin of the unique objects offered by the Met.

this map shows the geolocation of selected galleries from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection

displays the total number of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art digital collection

this map shows the geolocation of selected galleries from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection

displays the total number of objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art digital collection

The visualization also serves to illustrate the reasoning for including particular artists in the exhibition and excluding others.  Presumably, the movement of Abstraction and its creation including more individuals than the ones lauded at the show, but these were the most influential in terms of interaction and creating the necessary support for the movement. 

Goodchild's article on volunteered geography examines some underlying issues of authority in terms of data driven visualizations and the narrative perspective that results from a position influenced by any number of external or internal factors.  This book, The Third World Atlas, originally printed in 1994, presents an opportunity for readers to examine the geopolitical relationship between developing and developed nations, illustrating the "common experiences" of Third World nations.  In this way, the book inverts the traditional narrative of defining 3rd World development in terms of 1st World socio, political, and economic relationships and attempts, through a variety of visualizations, to critically examine the reasons behind such disparate and uneven development.  

http://www.asterank.com/3d/ combines data on some 600,000 asteroids noting scientific data associated with location, orbit, mass, type and accessibility with economic aspects such as value and estimated profit.  This visualization encompasses a number of the themes and issues associated with the MacEachren and Kraak article.  Asterank-3d displays the enduring and future challenges of incorporating an increasingly diverse amount of information as our observations are enhanced by scientific and technological advancements and the challenges that come along with representing this new data in ever complex, informative and interactive applications.  This visualization incorporates "interactivity, animation, hyperlinks, increasingly immersive environments, and dynamic object behaviors" while responding to complex "multivariate geospatial data sets that include the third spatial dimension (e.g, volumetric atmospheric data) and time" (3).   Using these elements, the visualization creates an exploratory environment that contextualizes planetary orbits, asteroid position and the undone Cartesian coordinates of space, while also investigating various scientific phenomena and possible applications of asteroid mining and the cross referencing of a vast amount of scientific data. 

Designed by Robbie Tilton, this interactive graph, displaying total global emissions per country per year (up until 2010), is essentially a part-to-whole visualization with some extra use of color and graphics for added emphasis and affect.  Users can switch between a bar graph and what amounts to a traditional pie chart (though only the outer surface area is displayed, leaving the smokey globe to think about).  The visualization shows individual country (parts) effects upon the globe (whole) and uses varying color hues of red in order to show who pollutes the most (most opaque red) and the least (white).  However, the bar graph and the pie chart are not quite perfectly representative across their respective mediums and might be a little misleading, depending on which graphic the user examines.  Specifically, the pie chart creates to overlapping geographic sectors labeled "Asia & Oceania" (AO) and "Eurasia" (EA).  The problem here is that there is the possibility for statistical overlap depending on which countries in Asia were considered closer (how? culturally? geographically?) to Oceania and which were closer to that of Eurasia.  Typically, Eurasia is one continent that stretches from the "Atlantic in the west to the Pacific in the east...In the north Russia and Scandinavia abut [sic] the Arctic Ocean...Its southern borders are Africa, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia).  Whereas Oceania controversially consists of "coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific to the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas...or used more specifically to denote Australia and proximate islands" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania).  SInce there is no legend or key to denote which countries are included in which geographic location, the user may be left with a sense of confusion.  Likewise, when examining the bar chart, the geographic names change to specific countries such as China, Taiwan, India, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia, all of which might be considered part of one of the two geographic categories mentioned above. The whole visualization would certainly benefit from maintaining naming conventions between both manifestations and it seems that the information from the bar chart could have been easily applied to the pie chart

    One disadvantage I have noticed is that the time-scale requires the user to stop sliding in order to see a change in the information, rather than it being linked of programmed in such a way to create a simultaneous change in the information provided as the date is changes. 

Displays the highest ranking billionaires in a variety of visualizations, one of the most telling being the geospatial option.  By removing the caricature element, we remove, what I deem to be, an aspect of playfulness that takes away from the gravity of monetary and capital disbursement and the resulting inequalities.  

-Image taken from fastcodedesign.com

  I located these information visualizations on www.informationisbeautiful.net (data culled from a variety of sources as indicated at the bottom right of each visualization and published on www.guardiannews.com).