Quick, free non-spam publicity is a blessing to any software project, large or small. A friend of mine went looking for a place to publish his startup that wasn’t just full of pay-links and came up empty, so he started LaunchYourProject.com. It’s free to submit, and a little link-love never hurts, so if you’re starting or growing a site, give it a look over.
A site IA visualized in aiSee
One of the most overlooked facets of many major sites is the actual organizational hierarchy. Too many designers and programmers just segment things into a few quick sections without doing any deep thinking on the issue, which can lead to major issues later.
Recently, the Washington Post published this article on the challenges that the Obama team is encountering in bringing its pledges of open government into whitehouse.gov.
The gist of the article suggested that the team is struggling to work out a solution to making the text of proposed government action (particularly legislation up for signature) available and commentable. This got me thinking about how I might try to meet the challenge.
British newspaper The Independent has an interesting feature called ‘Mapping the Crisis’, featuring a node-link graph (which I’ve mentioned before) attemping to map the articles and discussion from the paper’s coverage of the current political situation in Israel/Gaza.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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: Read the rest of this entry »
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).
Socio-economic data is the most obvious use case for cartograms, particularly data from the United Nations and National Elections.
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.
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.
