A blog dedicated to data visualisation, all part of ongoing research for a book on Charles-Joseph Minard.
Data visualisation, interactive media and computational design are one focus of my work, but I also do research in the history of maps and diagrams.
These are beautiful!
Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.
A beautiful visualisation of shipping routes and cargo. Mesmerising!
You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Using a single path SVG, a smidge of CSS, and ~6 lines of JavaScript.
In this days of monolithic frameworks, I really like seeing modest but powerful patterns like this—small pieces that we can loosely join.
Hot nuclear blasts in your area.
(like Eric’s HYDEsim)
A social network for snippets of JavaScript effects in canvas, written in 140 characters or fewer. Impressive!
From Scott McCloud to responsive design, Dave is pondering our assumptions about screen real estate:
As the amount of information increases, removing details reduces information density and thereby increasing comprehension.
It reminds me of Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio.
Data visualisations created for The Times, complete with code.
A JavaScript library for displaying charts’n’graphs.
Nadieh has packaged up the code for her lovely loom diagrams as a plug-in for d3.
Such a great primer on game theory—well worth half an hour of your time.
Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.
Hypnotic.
In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.
Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.
ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
Fontlandia is yours to explore.
By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
A gorgeous visualisation of satellites in Earth orbit. Click around to grasp the scale of the network.
Watching this data visualisation on its high speed setting is quite hypnotic.
Russell wrote an article for Wired magazine all about PowerPoint, but this extended director’s cut on his own site is the real deal.
Who knew that the creator of PowerPoint was such an enthusiast for the concertina?