Sightsmap provides interactive ‘sightseeing heatmap’

Just come across a really interesting interactive project from Estonian Professor, Tanel Tammet, called ‘Sightsmap‘ which overlays a heatmap onto a Google map platform allowing users to pan and zoom around the globe to see the locations where the most intensely photographed areas in the world.

The heatmap is a representation of the number of available Panoramio photos for a given area. You can zoom into each location and then switch on the ‘photo’ view to see the images taken from each location. Furthermore, a drop down option lets you display markers for the most popular 5, 10, 100, etc. locations in the world.

Visualising Data is on the move – offline for a short period

Just wanted to inform readers and anybody contacting me that I will be offline and out of action for the next few days as I’m moving house.

I’m leaving the relative hustle and bustle of city life in Leeds to the more quaint world of Hebden Bridge, the picturesque pennine town which has a rich literary history and creative heritage, as its famous welcome sign announces. I’m not sure if I’d necessarily consider myself a wealthy yuppy type, though:

During the seventies and eighties the town was repopulated by a motley mixture of artists, writers, photographers, musicians, alternative practitioners, teachers, green and New Age activists and more recently, wealthier yuppy types. The area has a rich literary history. The Bronte sisters wrote their famous novels just a few miles away in Haworth, the American poet, Sylvia Plath is buried at Heptonstall on the hill overlooking Hebden Bridge and the poet laureate, Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, two miles away.

I’ll be back as soon as things settle down and my broadband gets back up and running, but do bear with me for a while if you’re awaiting responses to emails or other interactions. Thanks!

Introducing new site sponsors, Jess3

I’m delighted to announce Jess3 are the latest site sponsors of Visualising Data.

I’ll leave the task of most accurately defining the range of interactive engagement projects Jess3 undertake to CEO and Founder, Jesse Thomas:

JESS3 is a creative interactive agency that specializes in visual storytelling. We challenge ourselves and our clients to push the limits of what creativity and engagement means. Our services range from UI / UX, animation, content creation and digital PR to developing large-scale installations, social strategies, data visualizations and infographics.

Visit the Projects page to have a look through the featured designs or follow their latest developments via their Twitter feed @jess3.

Announcing 2012 data visualisation training course dates

Last month I shared details of the locations where I was planning to deliver my “Introduction to Data Visualisation” training courses during the first half of 2012. I’m delighted to announce more details about the schedule, specifically the dates of the events.

This is the list of locations I will be visiting and the dates on which I will be delivering the courses. Venue details will be confirmed in due course but, as a guide, they will be centrally located in all cases. Check the individual training event pages for updates once they have been arranged.

To register for an event simply click on the links below and follow the payment instructions.

Training testimonials

You could take my word that this is a great course and everyone will get loads of value from it should they attend, but I’m bound to say that. Alternatively, if you need that little bit of extra persuasion, here’s a selection of comments and feedback from recent delegates…

Best of the visualisation web… December 2011 (part 2)

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter and Google+ you will see many of these items shared as soon as I find them.

Here’s part two of the latest collection from December 2011 (see part one):

Smashing Magazine | The Messy Art of UX Sketching – “I hear a lot of people talking about the importance of sketching when designing or problem-solving, yet it seems that very few people actually sketch” | Article

Urban Movements | New project mapping taxi routes in London | Static Visualisation

Visual.ly | “2D’s Company, 3D’s a Crowd” – another excellent blog post from visual.ly exploring the principles behind flaws with 3D representations of 2D data | Type

Excel Charts | “Data visualization is about finding and communicating patterns. But here is an often-forgotten truism: patterns are not some kind of ready-to-wear knowledge” | Article

BBC Technology News | UK Government opens up more data for free | Article

Business Week | Correlation or Causation? Correlation may not imply causation, but it sure can help us insinuate it – some humorous examples that explore this often misused statistical concept | Statistics

Guardian Datablog | 2011: the year in data, journalism (and charts) | Collection

Brainpickings | An Illustrated Visualization of What Can Happen in a Single Second | Book Preview

Core77 | First in a great series of profiles of a series of brilliant artists/illustrators famed for their cut-away/cross-section works | Illustrations

Guardian | 2011 – the news year in review | Interactive Visualisation

Infosthetics | Citeology: Visualizing the Relationships between Research Publications | Interactive Visualisation

Vis4.net | Let’s Keep Symbol Maps Clean And Tidy | Tutorial

Wired | Spineless Classics turns whole books into graphic art | Visualisations

FastCo Design | “Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul” – Article/Interview with Nick Felton and Joey Flynn | Article/Interview

CR Blog | Honda goes ‘Off the Grid’ – “The latest work for Honda by Wieden + Kennedy is an interactive online experience that takes its cues from the way Street View allows users to move and look around a 360 degree photographed environment” | Advertising

Flink Labs | Ben Hosken’s Top 5 in 2011 and outlook for 2012 | Review/Collection

The Why Axis | Google Zeitgeist Misses the Mark for 2011 – a much more in depth analysis (than I provided!) of the failure of the Google Zeitgeist visualisation | Critique

On Goals Scored | “This is a blog of football things that are interesting to look at. I usually post infographics or datagraphics that I have made. I also post about football posters, crests and the like” | Site

Data Remixed | How Data Visualization is Like Chess | Type

Nodebox Workshop | The output of the projects produced during the workshop “Dataviz: Visual Repesentation of Complex Phenomena” held in Torino during December 2011, Torino” | Collections

Wired | How Does the Brain Perceive Art? | Theory

Boston Globe | Brothers David and Yakir Reshef develop a new statistical tools “that rapidly flags patterns and identifies correlations in huge databases, from sports statistics to online social networks to the genomes being churned out by science laboratories” | Article

Greg Judelman | MSc Thesis – Knowledge Visualization: Problems and Principles for Mapping the Knowledge Space | Thesis

Perceptual Edge | Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design | Article

MK Web | The wonderful and endlessly interesting site of Martin Krzywinski | Site

Guardian | England riots: mapping the distance from home to offence | Animated Visualisation

Flowing Data | Microsoft continues to be responsible for some of the worst product advertising, here trying to appeal to those who want explosions with their visual presentations | Video

American Copy Editors Society | More classic cock ups from the Fox News graphics portfolio | Bloopers

Presenting the top five most popular posts on Visualising Data during the past month:

1. The worst visualisation I’ve seen this year? Google Zeitgeist 2011 – December 16th, 2011

2. 10 significant visualisation developments: July to December 2011 – December 19th, 2011

3. O’Reilly Strata Conference, Santa Clara 2012 (20% reader discount) – December 9th, 2011

4. Best of the visualisation web… November 2011 (part 1) – December 5th, 2011

5. Best of the visualisation web… November 2011 (part 2) – December 5th, 2011

Finally, many thanks to my site sponsors, Instant Atlas, for their support during the past month (check out their 30-day free trial offer).

Best of the visualisation web… December 2011 (part 1)

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on Twitter and Google+ you will see many of these items shared as soon as I find them.

Here’s part one of the latest collection from December 2011 (see part two):

Vis4.net | Gregor provides a comprehensive guide to how to properly choropleth map colour classifications | Tutorial

Nederland Van Boven | Visualisation project which projects and maps the potential accessible locations you could travel from a given location using a start point and set journey time | Interactive Visualisation

Core77 | Interview with Matt Webb, the CEO of Berg, with a focus on the exciting new device the “Little Printer” | Interview

Flowing Data | Video of Shan Carter (New York Times) speaking about telling stories with data | Video

Sociable Physics | This movie shows a heatmap of London Bikeshare activity over the course of an average day | Animated Visualisation

Excel Charts | Jorge Camoes attempts to recreate famous William Playfair visualisations | Static Visualisation

Junk Charts | Demonstration of statistical adjustment in charts, specifically maps | Article

Infosthetics | Video of Amanda Cox (New York Times) talking about developing infographics at the paper and explains some of the lessons they have learnt | Video

Guardian | In a new series Nathan Green shows how statistics can help make sense of life’s perplexing data and distinguish facts from distortions | Article

Guardian | Riot rumours: how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis. Interactive piece from the Guardian which includes a helpful guide to explain how it was created | Type

Stamen | Stamen project about the Californian Health Care Foundation | Project Overview

Visual.ly Blog | Very helpful and thorough article about colour theory | Theory

Discover Magazine | Visualising a geogmagnetic storm via an animation based on the converted sounds, really is quite mesmerising as it says in the title | Animated Visualisation

Brainpickings | 7 Essential Books on Data Visualization & Computational Art | Resources

Substratum | Substratum is a series of genuinely interesting and inspiring interviews with THE biggest names in the field | Interview

O’Reilly Radar | Article/interview with GreenGoose founder with Brian Krejcarek about his company’s small stickers which have built in sensors connected to the internet and the potential for the data collected | Interview

Bloomberg Business | Profile of Tableau co-founder Pat Hanrahan – “The former Pixar engineer applies some graphics magic to spreadsheets” | Article

The Atlantic | “Ending the infographic plague”. Kind of explains the angle of this piece | Article

O’Reilly Radar | “Don’t blame the information for your bad habits” – Article/Interview with Clay Johnson on info overload vs. info overconsumption.| Interview

Hadley Wickham | The boxplot plot has been around for over 40 years and this paper summarises the improvements, extensions and variations since Tukey first introduced his ‘schematic plot in 1970 | Paper

Forbes | Naomi Robbins encourages users to think outside of the chart menus to avoid the mistake of choosing the wrong graph type for the data | Type

Vimeo | The ECOSPHERE is a real-time Twitter visualisation made for CNN inspired by the plant world and based on the laws of nature. This video explains about the engine behind the Ecosphere project | Video

UI Transitions | “Meaningful Transitions deals with the use of animations in the user interface, documenting transitions in a clustered way to show at which point transitions can be a helpful extension to a static user interface, because of cognitive benefits to enhance the user experience” | Site

Spatial Analysis | The best map based visualisations of 2011 | Visualisation Collection

Digital Humanities Specialist | Detailed article about the three pillars of Digital Humanities research: Text Analysis, Spatial Analysis and Network Analysis | Theory

Prezi | Prezi from Jojo Malig about data-driven journalism and data visualisation | Presentation

Revolutions Blog | Mapping prosperity in France using R | Static Visualisation

Fell In Love With Data | Intgerview with Jorge Camoes about his experiences using Excel for data visualisations | Interview

Flowing Data | Another classic in the long (and increasing) line of dodgy visualisation examples from Fox News | Static Visualisation

Vis4.net | Another excellent article by Gregor Aisch about the some important perceptions about the equidistance of colours | Theory

Presenting the top five most popular posts on Visualising Data during the past month:

1. The worst visualisation I’ve seen this year? Google Zeitgeist 2011 – December 16th, 2011

2. 10 significant visualisation developments: July to December 2011 – December 19th, 2011

3. O’Reilly Strata Conference, Santa Clara 2012 (20% reader discount) – December 9th, 2011

4. Best of the visualisation web… November 2011 (part 1) – December 5th, 2011

5. Best of the visualisation web… November 2011 (part 2) – December 5th, 2011

Finally, many thanks to my site sponsors, Instant Atlas, for their support during the past month (check out their 30-day free trial offer).

Graphics now appearing on coins!

My first post of 2012 should be considered slightly off-topic but I thought it was still worthy of a share as an example of visual explanation. I really like the idea behind the new “50p Sports Collection” released by the Royal Mint to commemorate the 2012 London Olympics. A competition was run to invite special coin designs to be released for each of the sporting events taking place and I was especially drawn to the winning coin design for football.

As you can see from the close-up image below, designer Neil Wolfson has chosen to use the design space provided to graphically explain the offside rule. As any football fan will know, articulating this most contentious of laws is one of life’s most recurring and often fruitless challenges.

Sure, it doesn’t quite cover every nuance of the official FIFA rulebook (page 33 if you’re interested) but it is a novel solution to this design challenge.

10 significant visualisation developments: July to December 2011

Back in July I published a collection of the 10 most significant visualisation developments from the first half of 2011. These were a very personal view of the most prominent, memorable, significant, progressive and appealing developments of the year so far.

As we prepare to bid farewell to 2011 I am now looking back over the latter half of the year with a follow up collection of developments that I perceive to have had most significance during the period July to December.

As I made clear in the previous post, there will be selections here that won’t or wouldn’t make other peoples’ top 10s but I wouldn’t expect them to. These are just things that struck a chord with me and fulfill my basic criteria that they further the progress of data visualisation in their own particular way.

And so, in no particular order…

1. “We’re hiring!” – The increasing prevalence of data visualisation careers

Within the context of the worst economic conditions in many generations, data visualisation not only seems to be bucking the trend but actually continues to thrive against the odds. Over the past few years we have seen the field move from the fringes to become an increasingly mainstream discipline and this is being reflected in what I perceive to be a steady increase in prevalence of attractive jobs, postings and project opportunities in organisations and visualisation agencies for people with the key skills and knowledge. In recent times we have seen openings with David McCandless, Periscopic, Twitter and Interactive things, to name but a few. Data science in particular keeps being discussed as an emerging discipline and there is clearly a much better understanding about the value of these roles within businesses and organisations. There is perhaps one aspect which will hopefully see significant progress during 2012. Nathan’s FlowingData jobs forum is an excellent stream of opportunities both for postings and projects, and there are always avenues to pursue via LinkedIn, however, otherwise there is still much demand for a better established data visualisation B2B marketplace to connect designers and consultants with the businesses out there who are clearly, increasingly interested in this activity.

2. The relentless stream of amazing online content

One of the trends I’ve been increasingly aware of during 2011, in general, but specifically the latter six months, has been the incredible, increasing volume of magnificent content available across the web. As visitors to this site will know, I compile a monthly collection of the best data visualisation content I find during the previous month. I have found the size of this task has grown considerably and I seem to save or bookmark a greater volume of superb material month-on-month, meaning I now need to present my collection over two posts to make it remotely digestible. I have been especially blown away by the relentless stream of inspirational video content with so many hours-worth of invaluable footage of leading practitioners discussing great projects or imparting their considerable wisdom. Examples would be conferences such as the O’Reilly Strata and the Eyeo Festival which captured, compiled and shared superb collections of speakers. There is, of course, always something amazing worth watching on TED and you should check out Benjamin’s excellently curated vimeo channel, with around 350 videos available.

3. The rise of the ‘Truth and Beauty Operator’

It would difficult to argue against Moritz Stefaner being recognised as the most prolific, prominent and celebrated visualisation designer of 2011. I included his OECD Better Life Index project on my previous ‘significant developments‘ post (which also received the gold seal of approval from Stephen Few!) and since then we have seen a number of great projects from or involving Moritz, such as the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Survey and the Max Planck Research Networks project. On top of that, in one of my favourite blog posts of the year, he generously shared his thoughts about ‘How to Become a Data Visualization Freelancer‘ in an interview with Enrico Bertini. He has probably done more speaking events this year than Al Gore and you can now read his thoughts in this recent interview with Benjamin Wiederkehr for the excellent Substratum series. Putting my forecasters hat on, and maintaining the European theme, my tip(s) for the next 6 months would be that Gregor Aisch or Jan Willem Tulp will occupy one of these top 10 spots…

4. Some great new titles on the bookshelf

The second half of 2011 was decorated by the release of several important data visualisation books, including Nathan Yau’s ‘Visualize This’ (my review here), Noah Iliinsky and Julie Steele’s ‘Designing Data Visualizations‘ (review coming soon) and Manuel Lima’s ‘Visual Complexity‘ (review coming soon). News has also just reached me that the Guardian datastore is publishing an e-book about its work in time for Christmas so that’s another to look forward to. If you want something a little bit different, and harmless infographics is your thing, then the Lonely Planet’s ‘How to Land a Jumbo Jet‘ book of travel-related visualisations has now also been published. With regards to 2012, news that Tamara Munzner is working on a book (preview chapters) is great news and I really look forward to reading that, as I do the English translation of Alberto Cairo’s El Arte Functional, due next summer.

5. Forbes American Migration

Published in November, this interactive map, created by Jon Bruner for Forbes, illustrated the patterns of migration within the US – involving almost 40 million Americans annually – by tracing the movement between each county over a 5 year period. As Bruner observes, this piece reflects the shifting “geographical marketplace of the States during the boom and bust of the last decade”. Based on IRS data, the selection of a county will display all the migration connections with other counties: those coloured blue send more migrants to the selected county; those in red take more than they send. The connecting arrows were perhaps somewhat redundant (in certain situations, like LA, they hide the county detail) but I found it an incredibly engaging solution, one that lured me into spend a significant amount of time interacting with it. The site’s social media metrics suggest many people have explored the data and reveals that this interactive has successfully made the subject matter accessible to all, allowing people to unlock the myriad stories that exist about this period of American social and economic history. I also appreciated the accompanying narratives from several writers who offered their expert perspectives on the key insights.

6. Hurricane Irene trackers – New York Times & Stamen

Towards the end of August, the focus of much news coverage across the western world was on the imminent Hollywood-esque arrival of the powerful Hurricane Irene along the east coast of the US. The main angle of media attention concerned its potential threat and impact on densely populated areas such as New York City. There were two prominent live visualisations used to track the progress of the hurricane, one developed by Stamen for MSNBC and the other for New York Times by the usual suspects Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Matthew Ericson. I couldn’t split the two so decided to include both, especially as I feel the context of these tools and the story overall reflected the growing maturity of the visualisation discipline. Not only were they deployed so prominently in the coverage of this developing story (as opposed to a post-event analysis) but both of these red-hot graphics groups were capable of successfully mobilising wonderfully effective, informative and elegant visualisation solutions in limited time.
 

7. Occupy George

“By circulating dollar bills stamped with fact-based infographics, Occupy George informs the public of America’s daunting economic disparity one bill at a time”. A very straightforward application of visualisation but one that seemed to strike a real chord with the sentiment of those involved or sympathetic to the Occupy movement, whether active or passive. The idea was that people could download the templates of various dollar bill infographics and then print them to use as props in the various protest movements that were spreading across the globe.

8. Are we learning to get along better?

A few articles over the past 6 months seems to encapsulate the sense I’ve picked up on that we might be learning to live more cordially alongside one another. By that, I mean infographics people and data visualisation people, pragmatic visualisation people and aesthetic visualisation people. In one of my favourite posts of the year, Zach Gemignani observed the relationship between artists and practitioners in data visualisation and rationalised how they can and should co-exist in a healthy discipline. Jorge Camoes added to this theme with an interesting piece about how one person can find and experience patterns that the next person may not, it is a truly individual experience. Enrico Bertini discussed how we should seek to help and advise infographic designers, in whose work we may identify significant flaws, rather than just dismiss or discount their contributions. Nathan discussed how we should come to acknowledge the important in the visualisation eco-system of low quality infographics and rather than chase them out of town, we should worry more if they start to disappear (in fact, maybe we should just come clean and confess our love for them). Finally, in a slightly different context, Robert Kosara made the observation from the VisWeek conference that visualisation was ‘growing up’ and had demonstrated evidence of it actually working (!). Without this sort of real-world evidence, and continuing attempts to define and clarify the different roles of visualisation, we would continue to be treading water and doing battle with one another, allowing the traditional fault lines to dominate coverage of the subject. Instead, I think we’re starting to see some real shape and harmony forming. Now, who fancies a group hug?

9. So many great, animated geospatial visualisations

I wrote at length about the power of animated geospatial visualisations in telling stories my O’Reilly Radar piece and it is fair to say that the latter half of 2011 has been notable for a number of fantastic exhibitions of this popular method, including, but not limited to: Derek Watkins’ visualisation of US post office expansion, the Stanford visualisation of the spread of newspapers across the US, Mahir Yavuz’s ‘Sense of Patterns‘, NASA’s Visual Tour of Earth’s Fires and Michael Kriel’s iPhone movement project.

10. The launch of Visual.ly

The most high profile launch of the year came in the shape of Visual.ly, the field’s latest platform for showcasing the popularity of visualisation and infographics. Within just three months of launching a teaser preview video of their offering, 60,000 people had been sufficiently inspired to sign up for invites and Visual.ly had attracted an impressive array of partners, backers, and advisors. They now have nearly 50,000 twitter followers and recently announced that they have raised $2M to build their business further. Recently, they launched a blog section of the site and if the early articles are to go by, this could be a very promising source of subject and knowledge content. Exciting stuff, but where does it all lead? Well, the most eagerly anticipated development within the field is still yet to launch – the enigmatic automated facility for registered users to create their own web-based infographics and visualisations, which was due at the end of 2011 but is yet to see light. We await to see how successful this tool will prove to be with casual and experienced designers alike, and there is still much concern and contempt for the T&Cs associated with the potential exploitation of content published on the site but, regardless, it has certainly been a significant arrival on the scene.

Special mentions…

Having once again struggled to keep this list down to only 10, here are some special mentions for a few further developments that deserve a special mention:

Experimental isarithmic maps visualise electoral data - David B. Sparks, a fifth-year PhD candidate at Duke University, published a fascinating set of experiments using ‘Isarithmic’ maps to visualise US party identification.

Guardian Hacking Timeline – I included this because of the multi-dimensional representation of the Hacking story as it evolves over time. You have the basic device of the timeline which plots the number of tweets per hour, but you have the accompanying, pulsing bubble chart reflecting the shifting focus of the story, the key event snippets, the most prominent tweets and dynamic keyword analysis. Every angle was comprehensively covered.

Eric Fischer – Eric has been responsible for a number of excellent visualisation projects during 2011, with Flickr data proving to be his particular choice of raw material – two of his most notable projects included London’s Twitter And Flickr Traffic and Visualising seasonal and temporal patterns in Flickr photos.

Cinemetrics - There’s not much practical insight emerging from this project but I really loved the innovative work of Frederic Brodbeck’s project to extract, analyse and then visually re-packaging many different metrics associated with movies, including duration of scenes, average colour and scene motion.

Visualizing.org Marathons - over the past few months Visualizing.org have been running a series of 24 hour visualisation marathons for student teams to compete. These have been excellent events, providing the potential next generation of visualisation designers with a unique opportunity to practice and develop their skills and experiences. Hopefully we will see more events like this repeated in 2012.

Honoured to be a judge and speaker at Malofiej 20

Just a quick announcement to share that I am absolutely thrilled and honoured to have been invited to attend Malofiej 20, the 20th edition of the ‘most important journalistic infographics event in the world’, as a judge and speaker.

I will be providing updates on this site and via the Malofiej 20 blog, sharing my experiences as a bright-eyed, first time attendee during the build up and the event itself.

My sincere thanks to Javier Errea, chairman of the Malofiej World Infographics Summit and Competition, and also to Alberto Cairo who I look forward greatly to meeting along with all the other members, speakers, judges and delegates in March!

Visualizing.org video tells the visualisation story of 2011

Here’s a nice little video wrap-up of 2011 from the splendid people at Visualizing.org, providing a quick look through the year’s events using their visualisation contests and uploaded visualisation projects to tell the story…

You can navigate through a gallery of all the projects displayed in the video here.