Best of the visualisation web… May 2011

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking articles I’ve come across during the previous month. If you follow me on

Twitter you will see many of these items tweeted as soon as I find them. Here’s the latest collection from May 2011:

Ideas – Fortune Grey | The climate debate is a failure of data visualisation – can we tell data stories better?

The Dohop Travel Blog | 6 unusual city maps – locals vs tourists

Eager Eyes | A middle ground

TEDTalks | Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity

Typetoken | Typetoken is a new online magazine that asks you to join its journey into the symbolic world of typography

Fell In Love With Data | Are you a real data visualization warrior? Participate to the VAST challenge!

OUseful.Info | Fragments: Glueing different data sources together with Google Refine

Culture Lab | Data as you’ve never visualised it before

Fell In Love With Data | Data visualization and influence (Part 1)

New York Times | The death of a terrorist: A turning point?

Datavisualization.ch | Food Consumed: Lauren Manning, a New York based designer, explores various methods to visualize one single data set for her thesis

Dexigner | This is the story of agriculture and the green economy

Infosthetics | Google Correlate: Find search queries that correlate with real-world data

Econym | Google Maps API tutorial

Flowing Data | How to map connections with great circles

Hyperakt | Visual analysis of the European Cups/Champions League Finals 1956 – 2011

fastco Design | Infographic Of The Day: Ben Fry And GE Bring Health Care Crisis To iPad

Dynamic Diagrams | Follow the dots, not the lines

Sage | Information Visualization, an international, peer-reviewed journal, is essential reading for researchers and practitioners of information visualization

Matthew Ericson | A list of interactive graphics mentioned in his speech at the International Journalism Festival about the interactive graphics and data visualizations produced at The New York Times

Information Age | Is information a human right?

OECD | Interactive tool to see how your country performs on the topics you feel make for a better life

Jerome Cukier | OECD Better life index – a post mortem

O’Reilly Radar | Lessons of the Victorian data revolution

LukeW | Web App Masters: Notes from Noah Iliinsky’s ‘Steps to Beautiful Visualizations’ presentation

Matthew Healey | Processing and visualisation with Jer Thorp

Meaning in Communication | The Science of Persuasion

Monster Swell | Slides for ‘Fixing reality with data visualization’

Infosthetics | Number Picture is a web application that enables you to create and share fresh and interesting tools for visualizing data.

One.org | Stamen Design’s ‘One – The data report 2011’

Cnet | Planetary app turns music library into galactic art (Q&A)

Fathom | Some thoughts on where visualization is going – Ben Fry

Domus Web | The design curator of MoMA reflects on the currency of visualization design

Drawar | The boundaries of pretty design

Washington Monthly | The Information Sage – Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.

Eager Eyes | Visualization choice influences decisions

Visualizing.org | Q&A with Moritz Stefaner

Vizzuality | Visualizing the latest spanish elections

Fell In Love With Data | Do visualizations need to be “accurate”?

Bloomberg | A collection on animated visual insights – be careful, this might hurt your eyes…

CR Blog | Universal Everything’s Deutsche Bank videowall

@SeeingStructure | Hundreds of years of water flow recorded and visualized in stone

New York Times | New ways to exploit raw data may bring surge of innovation, a study says

Fell In Love With Data | Data Visualization and Influence (Part 2) – examples and links

Google Think Insights | “We base our business on this belief, and do the studies to back it up. This site is where we share with you what we’ve learned.”

Eager Eyes | A Middle Ground