VisualEverything

Great interactive exploration of the details behind 75 years of Marvel Comics created by two french students.

Lovely image map of our emotions and their interrelationships. 

One of the first posts on our new site that we've just launched.

This is a blog post from the Guardian on the art in Pi. This is really geek heaven, a combination of maths and art blended into a beautiful palette of colours.

We're increasingly used to seeing data mapped across regions and countries to help illustrate geographic information. This incredible map from 1861 created for President Abraham Lincoln with degrees of dark shading of each county reflecting the number of slaves who lived there is a fine example. 

As Gareth Cook puts it in his article for The New Yorker:

In the map, Lincoln saw testimony that the American south was not a uniform bloc. Areas of heavy slavery—the darkened banks along the Mississippi River, for example—tended to be secessionist, but the areas in between held the hope of pro-Union sympathy. Unlike traditional cartography, the map was designed to portray political terrain and, in Lincoln’s mind, moral terrain. The President called it his “slave map.” Today we would call it an infographic.

Exciting exhibition to explore at the British Library. 

Beautiful science: Picturing data, inspiring insight

Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist. This is as true in today's era of genome sequencing and climate models as it was in the 19th century.

Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time.

From John Snow's plotting of the 1854 London cholera infections on a map to colourful depictions of the tree of life, discover how picturing scientific data provides new insight into our lives.

Interesting data project from by Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia:

"Invisible Cities visualizes the social networks in the urban environment. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Instagram in real-time and aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data. Nodes are connected by narrative threads, based on themes emerging from the overlaid information. These pathways create dense meta-networks, blanketing the terrain and connecting disparate areas of the city. Through an immersive, three-dimensional information landscape, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical environment, one of intersections, discovery, and memory.

Real time data visualisation.

Not what you'd usually expect to see in terms of data visualisation, but this effectively what inFORM is doing. Using Kinetic to record the data it is then translating the data into the co-ordinated movement of the pins of a dynamic shape display.

Wonderfully amazing and great video to convey the potential power of the application.

Developed by those clever folk at the Tangible Media Group at MIT, you can find out more about the inFORM project on their site.

This wonderfully informative and insightful data visualisation created by W. Braford Paley in collaboration with Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans are a joy to interpret.

Taking the look of a vintage map Bradford has crafted a beautiful map of nations and their contribution to the world of science. Each area of the map represents a different area of the sciences (chemistry, physics, social sciences etc). The size of the nodes represents the depth of the work in a particular subject matter. Then interconnecting lines represent interdisciplinary research.

Bradford has then created several of these "maps" to illustrate the scientific strength of nations from around the globe. The U.S. looks particularly strong in areas around the social sciences, but not so strong at interdisciplinary research. Where as the U.K. and Taiwan seemed to have much stronger interdisciplinary research.

We've been checking out the wonderful work coming out of Dutch agency Clever Franke.

This particular project was selected due to our fascination with sport and data visualisation around sport, but it's one of many lovely pieces of work completed by the agency.

The work reviews the performance of the basketball team Miami Heat. They show how often the players shoot from each position on the basketball court, and how may points each of those shots deliver. What the diagrams illustrate is how efficient Miami Heat are against their opponents particularly when taking their 3 point shots.

The use of curved arcs create a visually impressive illustration, that made me think of the looping ball immediately, the colours just add to the overall aesthetic beautifully.

We like the tactile nature of this data visualisation, but also the humour, although sadly you can't quite read what the artist, Maren Gyllenhammar, has actually said! But given the fact it's commentary on how bad the British are at dressing to keep warm and it's coming from a Norwegian, I'm guessing it pulls no punches!

Maren has used wools and other similar materials to execute the design, adding to the story. With commentary on selection of clothes and data around date and time of year to further tell the tale.

It's not the most complex data visualisations going, from either a data point of view nor execution. But its simplicity then empowers the humour and the tactile nature.

Frederic Brodbeck's Cinematics is a wonderful project. Analysing a number of data sets Frederic creates a visual fingerprint (not dissimilar to the NY Times fashion version) for a series of well known films.

Reviewing the films and breaking the video files into the various components that make the whole, video, audio, subtitles, etc. Then processing them to cover average shot length, motion measuring, colour palettes. Then combining all of these variables to create unique fingerprints for each film.

Frederic developed custom software to allow him to process all of this information and then create the fingerprints. He has made nearly all of the code available to those that are interested via GitHub.

If I'm honest I prefer the static versions created from the project, I find the dynamic versions a little too overwhelming. But I love the completeness of the project from the development of the software, making it available as open source code, production of posters, supporting videos and finally the published supporting documentation.

In Frederic's words he wants people to analyse the fingerprints and decide which suits their taste:

"“I don’t want to see the dark one with lots of motion, that colourful one with the great amount of spoken words looks much more interesting to me.”

Lovely job Frederic, hat tip to you.

These wonderful geological maps created by Harold Fisk in 1944 are stunning early data visualisations.

The collection, this is just one of several, depict the course of the Mississippi over time. Showing the meandering changes of direction the river takes over the land.

I find these mesmerising in appearance, immediately pulling my imagination to the slow flow of the Mississippi that I've never seen, but read about many times.

For those naysayers that say data visualisation is a shortlived thing, a trend, surely this is evidence that it's not, it's just about the beauty of the execution and the value in the story told.

I'm a big mountain fan.

Just found this lovely infographic around first ascents of the highest peaks in the world.

Created by Dutch graphic artist Manouk van den Berg this piece features in a publication called Brockhaus Encyclopedia Infographics, through Bureau Oberhaeuser.