dataviz

I can’t recall where I found this, but it’s very very cool:

From Information Is Beautiful: Infographic on various billions spent, or planned, or earned:

This is a great way to make a complex document – a national budget or a Stimulus Package – tangible and accessible.  I think newspapers are starting to compete with each other as we are starting to see some great on-line visualizations, New York Times, USA Today and now the Washington Post.

I think the following viz would be even better if the image was hyperlinked to the actual budget document and each bubble took you to the section it represents.  But alas!  This stuff is hard work and this image is a fine start!

via – Flowing Data

Visualization of the US Stimulus Package

Wi-fi structures and people shapes, from Dan Hill:

One of the ideas I’ve been exploring relates to how urban industry – in the widest sense of the word – in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today’s information-rich environments – like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office – are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing. [more...]

The visuals I saw while watching the US elections on the tele on Tuesday were just plain dazzling.  Lots of speculative data, predictions, interactivity leading to scenarios and more speculation on the results, good visualizations, resulting from a visualization dissemination and creation infrastructure which manufactures the geographic imagination of the US Nation.  Obama stated in the speech that won him the candidacy for the Democrats (UK Guardian)

that there were no red states, no blue states, only the United States.

The maps we saw on US election night however, were all about blue and red differences.

Map of results by state

Zooming into county maps shows a different picture where colour speckles add up to a uniform blue for Ohio on the state map above. Many voices are not seen on the state map, the county map shows lots of diversity, as would the sub county map.  Maps tell all sorts of stories and can portray silences or consensus where in fact cacophonies and polarities exist. The county map looks way more red than blue for the Democratically won state of Ohio.

Speckles of red and blue in Ohio became a uniform Blue

Reading about the US Electoral system helps explain how this works out.

The map in popular culture is key to the formation of the collective imagination of the nation.  I do wonder if viewers will actually think that Hawaii and Alaska are really located in the ocean south of Arizona instead of one connected to Canada’s North and the other in the middle of the Pacific!

1 square = 1 electoral vote

Information Aesthetics produced an excellent blog post which includes links to numerous electoral visuals.  Watching this also highlighted the lack of maps and visuals during the Canadian 2008 Elections.  Eventually I did see a map on the Tele, around 11:30 PM on Radio Canada, while CBC showed none!

I was looking for maps all night on the Tele!  None appeared so I came home and found a few.   I wonder if the cost and license restrictions of the actual electoral boundary file was an issue for television networks and the media.  The only institution that provided a map with ridings was CBC. The rest were visualizations or shell maps of provinces and territories.

The CBC maps were interactive, with roll overs pop ups and some zooming capabilities!  As I predicted before seeing the maps, multicoloured areas are urban, west is blue with some patches of orange, centre is orange, east is baby blue, with some patches of red and blue, and all those country ridings are tory blue!  And Ottawa, which I did not predict, is surrounded by blue, with one orange and 2 reds!  Ontario, well, it is awfully blue!  Kinda fun to look around to see what is up!

CyberPresse has a pretty interesting visualization!  One cannot see the real geographic distribution of the results but it remains a creative and interactive way to see the votes!  As you scroll over the little squares a pop up window shows the results!  At a glance a user can see the number of seats per province and then look at the littles squares and their colours, this was perhaps a little less effective but I guess they were struggling with screen real estate and access to a base map.

CTV had a pretty rudimentary map of the provinces and territories.  If you click on the province you get a window of the ridings and a rather garish obtrusive list of ridings that blocks the map.  You select the riding and then you get the results of the province in a table but not a geographic distribution of results by riding.  The map is then left at the bottom of the page all lonely with not much information associated with it.

The Globe and Mail also had an interactive map but again just a shell with the provinces and territories like CTV example above, with a small bit of scroll over action that yields a pop up window and the left pane changing on the right.  Informative but not the big picture of the country like a map with all the ridings.

Finally there is our national institution, Elections Canada!  A few minutes ago it had no results! Oh My!  No maps, and not the most intersting way to access the info. I wonder if they will ever produce a map?  Will it be more than a static PDF? Since they own the base file you’d think they could do a little something with that monopoly access?  Or perhaps because Statistics Canada sells that for them they also have some sort of dissemination restrictions.

Some of us are kinda, well, obsessed with the political jockeying south of the border, and this little Canadian contest seems almost beside the point (of course it isn’t). But anyway, for those of you who are data junkies at the best of times, and now suffering from Obamamania, and/or Palin fever, there are a few great projects out of the good ol US of A. [Would be nice to see the same effort and creativity put into Canadian politics, but I suspect that's just dreaming.] Anyway, here a few nice sites to visit:

Everymomentnow.com, visual depiction of who’s in the news:

Fivethirtyeight.com (a site that digests all existing polling data, weighs it according to the polls’ past performance, and gives meta polling results, as well as some insightful commentary):

CafePress Meter (user-made t-shirt sales as polling indicator, apparently a far better measure than the traditional polls):

Do you have any good US election data sites? Any good Canadian ones?

I just came across Many-Eyes which is a really great online collaborative data visualization tool designed by the IBM Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Visualization Collaboration Lab.

You essentially contribute a dataset and use their online visualization tools to see what you’ve got. A colleague added these Canadian City datasets and it was truly very easy and helpfull to find different ways to tease out patterns and to assess the best way derive a story from them.  The results provided us with a boundary object to facilitate our discussions on how we will design a report.

The options are great as you can create contemporary tag clouds, treemaps, network maps, flow lines, bubble charts, block histograms as well as your usual line graphs, pie charts and bar graphs.  They even have some rudimentory choropleth mapping tools.  You can view multiple variables and time series for a particular dataset which allows you to see change.

In our case, we will probably play with these tools and also excell graphs, present these to our graphic designers who will trace them into the look and feel of our report.  The best part is to know that we can communicate effectively without robbing the visualization bank and by moving forward on more interesting ways to tell our stories.

Enjoy!

From gasbuddy.com:

Now you can see what gas prices are around the country at a glance. Areas are color coded according to their price for the average price for regular unleaded gasoline.

Here is the US map.

[via infoesthetics]

I am doing some work looking at broadband maps and atlases. I started off with a trip to the Carleton Map library, I followed some very knowledgeable map librarians around and picked up a huge roll of paper maps to begin exploring this new subject. I discovered an excellent little folding paper map on Digital Inclusion. As I was looking at its sources I discovered that this map was part of a broader and very exciting online Atlas project that includes numerous map themes on social justice, environment, health, etc.

I like these maps because they are aesthetically pleasing, are accompanied by a table of content explaining the themes and indicators represented, and with data sources (aka metadata) that are made obvious and easy to understand. Each map w/its associated information is an overview of an issue. There are membership requirements to access additional data related to the maps.

Finally, this company has an interesting business model. The publication of the paper map was sponsored by Alcatel and is a superb information marketing tool at conferences, the UN, WDB, ADB, OECD etc. It is also excellent swag. Maplecroft is also

a successful specialist research and advisory company focused on the non-financial performance of large multinationals. It has a strong corporate client base and research partnerships with leading international organisations, such as those within the auspices of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and prominent independent non-governmental organisations.

Maplecroft has developed particular expertise in strategy, management systems, indicators, cross sector partnership building, stakeholder engagement, audit, and risk management. It has a specific interest in cross sector engagement.

Primarily a commercial organisation, Maplecroft has formed and facilitated several strong multi-lateral partnerships with business, lobby groups and aid organisations for mutual benefit. It fundamentally operates as a social enterprise, whereby non-profit partner organisations gain from commercial engagements it may form. Maplecroft undertakes a great deal of pro-bono work, and seeks opportunities to contribute to the initiatives with which it becomes involved.

The cost of producing the high quality maps and associated information seen here is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the technology is the easy part, it is the cost of the minds and data associated with knowledge production and the maintenance of a reliable and trustworthy product that is really high. Few organizations beyond government can take on this sort of project on. It is most certainly an interesting and ethically driven business model.