Reddit User Chknbone dropped this little New Year’s present the other day and I thought it was too cool to leave unshared.

It’s a flow chart of the Ice Cube song Today Was A Good Day (NSFW Language). Classic rap makes for some amusing grammar and linguistic feats, and seeing it mapped out here is a good laugh, not to mention an amusing stretch of the flowchart metaphor.

So check out the original at flickr, and here’s to more cool stuff in 2009!

Axis maps blog is sharing an interesting technique for adding another dimension of data to maps by using transparency.  Somewhat like a cartogram, they’ve taken each county in the US and modified it based on population density, but instead of stretching it to a new size, they’ve increased the alpha transparency to make more populated areas brighter and less populated areas faded out. (more…)

One of the most challenging types of data to convert into a chart or visualization is also one of the most common: Multi-Level or ‘Hierarchical’ data.

Perhaps every category of data is composed of sub-categories, or a change in one data point has a major effect on surrounding data, but regardless, the standard library of charts and graphs doesn’t offer much in the way of making hierarchical data clear, so here are a few alternatives: (more…)

A Standard 2008 Election Map (Upper), and a Cartogram skewed by Population (Lower)

Cartograms, or visualizations of an area skewed by some variable, are a powerful tool to control for disparities over a large area, especially with respect to politics.

A relatively large but sparsely populated area will dominate a standard projection, whereas a cartogram allows populated areas to be warped to show their true influence (See sidebar).

Applications of Cartograms:

Socio-economic data is the most obvious use case for cartograms, particularly data from the United Nations and National Elections.

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There’s a post by Joseph Hellerstein worth a read over on O’Reilly Radar: The Commoditization of Massive Data Analysis.  It’s more enterprise focused then small-normal business focused, but that’s just a consequence of the target audience.

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Well Formed Data is offering this post full of offbeat election and presidential data visualizations.

It’s definitely worth a look, I’m particularly enamored with the New York Times’ Presidential Physique Graph, although the data density is a bit low for being so large.

Whether it’s a campaign speech by a presidential contender, or a 300 page bestselling novel, large bodies of text are among the most requested topics for condensing into an infographic.

The purpose can vary from highlighting specific relations to contrasting points or use of language, but all of the following methods focus on distilling a volume of text down to a visualization.

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