Beautiful data visualisations of the original Choose Your Own Adventure stories. A project by Christian Swinehart.
posted by creeky on Nov 11, 2009 - 36 comments

This morning, Google launched a new feature called "Google Dashboard" that lets users view (and in some cases control,) what data is being stored on a range of more than 20 Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts and Latitude. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Nov 5, 2009 - 59 comments

Toronto's Open Civic Data. The city of Toronto has released its data to the world via the new Open Toronto initiative: geographic data for a variety of civic divisions, lists of licensed business, public transit stops, routes & schedules, a SOAP-based geocoding API and more.
posted by GuyZero on Nov 3, 2009 - 30 comments

Time was, even the Three Stooges didn't fear the Census. But now, turbulent political and economic times roiling the nation are expected to diminish initial participation by households in next year's Census. To counteract this, the Census will spend an unprecedented $326 million in marketing, including a Super Bowl ad, and will appear in a Spanish-language telenovela. [more inside]
posted by twoleftfeet on Oct 20, 2009 - 67 comments

He wasn't even supposed to perform, but when Michael Jackson took the stage solo at the Motown 25 in 1983, magic. Billie Jean. The moonwalk. The glove. It was one of those moments to remember. So a few years ago a coupla data dancers started The White Glove Tracking Project to commemorate the performance by analyzing the height and size of MJ's iconic white glove throughout, crowdsourcing the project frame by frame for 10,060 frames. Now the dataset is complete, and the Proce55ed magic is thrilling:
Slinky (75mb QT), Stretchy (45mb QT), and Shapely (33mb QT) by MeFi's own James Seo
Speed=Height (QT) by Zach Lieberman
Giant White Glove by Tim Knapen
and more in the gallery.
posted by carsonb on Oct 9, 2009 - 28 comments

Job Voyager: a data visualization tool for US occupations as a percentage of the labor pool, 1850-2000. (Stream graphs previously)
posted by OmieWise on Sep 22, 2009 - 17 comments

Archive Team: We are going to rescue your shit. (previously)
posted by stbalbach on Sep 15, 2009 - 44 comments

"Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore," by Robin Sloan. 'A short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization.' (via Boing Boing) [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Sep 11, 2009 - 18 comments

Know Thy Congressman (an Apps for America Project of Sunlight Labs) provides a handy bookmarklet that lets you get a quick overview of Congresscritters that you might not be familiar with. The winners for Round Two of Apps for America (focusing on data.gov) were announced yesterday. [more inside]
posted by sciurus on Sep 10, 2009 - 14 comments

"Death Risk Rankings calculates your risk of dying in the next year and allows you to compare that risk to others in the world." Fun with mortality data and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.
posted by OmieWise on Sep 4, 2009 - 28 comments

See What You Think. Information Is Beautiful.
posted by SinisterPurpose on Aug 17, 2009 - 33 comments

Digg Labs' Arc is a mesmerizing data visualization flash with an ongoing collage of various topics, a sort of animated zeitgeist: How to bake cheeseburger cupcakes l Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don’t want to know l The Newest Giraffe: As Cute As He Thinks He Is? l Wascally Wabbits l Stories arrange themselves around the circle as users digg them.
posted by nickyskye on Aug 16, 2009 - 11 comments

The fine folks at OkCupid, the dating site, have begun to analyze aggregate data from the questions their users answer to form dating profiles, revealing, among other things, that users in Nevada are more open to rape fanstasies than those from Michigan. [more inside]
posted by dammitjim on Jun 30, 2009 - 60 comments

Curious about the health of your bank? You might find BankTracker helpful. This site crunches the FDIC's publicly available numbers on banks' deposits, loans, and nonperforming loans, and makes them available in a search interface for banks and credit unions. [more inside]
posted by A dead Quaker on Jun 13, 2009 - 15 comments

The Guardian Datastore is running a competition for the best visualizations, mashups and applications built with and for the data in their datastore. Amongst other things, they currently have the latest data on MP's expenses, world booze consumption and two centuries of bio diversity data from Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. [more inside]
posted by johnny novak on Jun 12, 2009 - 6 comments

Data.gov is live! [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer on May 21, 2009 - 39 comments

Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data. In this TED talk, composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin describes some visualizations available at the AlloSphere Research Facility, where researchers stand inside a 3-story sphere and are surrounded by visual and sonic representations of data. Some specific visualizations in the video: fly through a brain, biogenerative algorithms, lattice of atoms, Schrodinger equation, and electron spin.
posted by twoleftfeet on Apr 25, 2009 - 32 comments

...the Department of Transportation will not keep secret the data we collect on birds striking airplanes. - Ray LaHood, United States Secretary of Transportation

From the dreaded mourning dove to the nefarious Canada goose to the humble armadillo, the FAA's recently released National Wildlife Strike Database ON-LINE contains information on aircraft/wildlife strikes from over 100,000 reported incidents between 1990 and 2008. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust on Apr 24, 2009 - 11 comments

The US Food and Drug Administration started regulating the labeling of food, beverages, and medicines after the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and added food coloring and cosmetics with the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. They have just released a new website, the FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963, containing data from thousands of cases of mislabeled or misadvertised products and drugs, available in multiple forms (text, PDF, metadata XML, .TIF image, etc.), with searchable archives. Poking around in the data will yield information on cases ranging from misbranding methamphetamine tablets, to quack "Film-O-Sonic" devices, to bacteria-laden unproven abortifacients sold over the counter, to purported "4-way" cures for baldness, to hunks of radium sold for putting in your drinking water to "stimulate the sex organs" (judged against for stating an unproven use, not for actual danger of product). Organized by the FDA's history office, the new database is a fascinating resource for historians, public safety advocates, researchers, and librarians.
posted by Asparagirl on Apr 6, 2009 - 28 comments

Following Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's expenses claim for pornographic films watched by her husband, which came hot on the heels of an investigation into expenses claims for MPs' second homes, the Guardian has published data on each MPs' claims. Now, it's been combined with data from They Work For You to create a map showing MPs' expenses claims, revealing interesting anomalies.
An investigation into MPs' expenses is forthcoming. [Previously]
posted by djgh on Apr 3, 2009 - 25 comments

Speaking of Edward Tufte (see below), sparklines are a type of information graphics characterized by their small size and data density named by Tufte. Sparklines were used by sites reporting the 2008 election and were first introduced on MeFi in 2005. There are now several ways to put sparklines on your own web site including: a simple jQuery plugin, a downloadable PHP library, a dynamic generator using a Python CGI program, and even a library for Ruby on Rails.
posted by netbros on Feb 27, 2009 - 8 comments

20 Useful Visualization Libraries from the excellent A Beautiful WWW. Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Nov 6, 2008 - 11 comments

Word Spectrum; SearchClock; Digg Rings; Bible Cross-references: the gorgeous analytical vizualizations of Chris Harrison. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Sep 18, 2008 - 17 comments

Graph your life at MIT's Mycrocosm. Simple interface. Interesting potential. Worrying about. Freelance: No Idea What the Hell Is Going On. Food and Liquid Consumption. Also allows for sharing datasets with other users.
posted by artifarce on Sep 8, 2008 - 10 comments

Sustainability of Digital Formats : a repository of mostly technical information about digital content file formats related to storing images (moving and still), text, sound and websites
posted by Gyan on Aug 29, 2008 - 9 comments

Stream graphs, or stacked graphs, are a new form of (sometimes interactive) visualization that present data in a fluid timescale format. For example, the NY Times website has a graph showing the box office receipts from 1996-2008. There's a Twitter streamgraph based on keywords. Here's one of all the musicians a Last.fm user has listened to over time. Track the popularity of baby names back to the 1880s. Possibly the most striking, if not necessarily intuitive, is this visualization of US population by county, 1790-2000. There's already an academic study of the technique.
posted by desjardins on Jul 31, 2008 - 27 comments

Who are Muslims? Gallup has conducted a poll "in 40 predominantly Muslim nations and among significant Muslim populations in the West. It is the first set of unified and scientifically representative views from 1.3 billion Muslims globally." They'll be parsing and interpreting this data for years, but for the time being, they've offered some of their key results online and in print. See also, the Muslim-West Facts Initiative. (via) [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea on Jul 28, 2008 - 37 comments

"Pulse", a project by Markus Kison, "...is a live visualisation of the recent emotional expressions written on the private weblogs of blogger.com. These emotional expressions are parsed according to a list of synonyms and transform a physical shapeshifting object...." (QT video) (via) [more inside]
posted by Kronos_to_Earth on Jul 14, 2008 - 4 comments

High performance kart racing is frequently misunderstood to be bumper-car-like "fun park" or "trailer park" karting in the US. [more inside]
posted by unpoppy on Jun 15, 2008 - 20 comments

Google's Android goes live for demo. Lots of video and stills. Cache.
posted by loquacious on May 28, 2008 - 62 comments

The intersect of data visualization and aural phenomena is a fascinating space, from simple chartings of the history of sampling to mapping the entire world of music (or even just electronica). Pop songs become sketches, iTunes libraries become twisted geometric forms, and last.fm listening behaviors form coloured orbs and waves. The collaborative networks of comtemporary rappers, jazz musicians, and classical composers are revealing of specific and meaningful community structures. Explore the algorithmic music of Stephan Wolfram's computational universe, listen to pi or e or the Mona Lisa or the weather or the temperature in New York City, discover the shape of sound, or just, you know, see music. Use the Echo Nest to visualize your own music (example), tag your music collection with colours, or just wade through the plethora of ways to map connections between artists and genres. (several previously)
posted by youarenothere on Apr 9, 2008 - 12 comments

Year Zero throughout history. Waffle Houses per capita. The 20th Century on Google Image. Dorothy Gambrell is very fond of data. [more inside]
posted by nebulawindphone on Mar 21, 2008 - 14 comments

Thoreau was into it. Scientists are using it to understand climate change. When Project Budburst starts again on Febraury 15th, you can participate, too. [more inside]
posted by Tehanu on Jan 27, 2008 - 15 comments

TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data
posted by Gyan on Dec 26, 2007 - 10 comments

Top 101 Cities Lists (in the US)
posted by graventy on Nov 6, 2007 - 48 comments

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Oct 18, 2007 - 47 comments

This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income. [via]
posted by tellurian on Aug 16, 2007 - 19 comments

Seattle is red hot and almost no other market is. So says this great data visualization that Zillow just put out. (bonus: while previewing the link I also noticed a useful page of quarterly reports for major real estate markets)
posted by jragon on Aug 15, 2007 - 42 comments

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches is a Smashing Magazine article examining a variety of increasingly popular or novel information visualization employed on modern websites.
posted by nthdegx on Aug 7, 2007 - 18 comments

Universe is the newest project from Jonathan Harris, who was also behind the amazing WeFeelFine, and the Yahoo Time Capsule. Here's a talk he gave about his projects at TED 2007.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jul 25, 2007 - 20 comments

Pie charts that represent the proportional amount of color in each country's national flag. Similar to this (previously), only not as pointed.
posted by tepidmonkey on May 28, 2007 - 33 comments

"To determine whether a diagram is good or bad, one needs to determine for what context it was designed for." PingMag (1, 2) interviews Andrew Vande Moere of infosthetics . A quick, informative read which includes pretty pictures of some MeFi faves.
posted by oneirodynia on Apr 9, 2007 - 11 comments

Data's mad at you, and he's still carrying a grudge. Four years after the movie tanked, Brent Spiner, who portrayed the character of Data, still thinks it's your fault that Star Trek: Nemesis performed poorly compared to its predecessor. "'Let's make a movie for the fans, because that's the people who actually go to see the films.' And what happened?," Spiner rhetorically asks. "They didn't go!" (Other films that opened around the same time included a small arthouse production from An Nua-Shealainn.) It might have instead been that the movie resembled "a 65th class reunion mixer where only eight surviving members show up — and there's nothing to drink." Of course, one can take pity on Spiner; one look at his filmography and realize he's only a few cancellations away from having to sing for his supper. But at least he didn't end up (unjustly) on the cutting room floor (In the meantime, Shatner has his own problems.)
posted by WCityMike on Feb 4, 2007 - 89 comments

Data analysis, brought to you by Big Blue, is following a trend. Data has never been more social. Geeks and statistics groupies used to be isolated, but the internet is changing that. Ever pine for a pile of Excel spreadsheets? Have you tried running an ANOVA on a year's worth of traffic data? You're not alone. New sites add sociability to cold hard facts; take a look at the "YouTube for data" or IBM's Many Eyes. Both sites induce squeals of delight from anyone who's ever felt Tuftian. What's next? One word: infornography. Please, keep your Standard Deviation jokes to yourself.
posted by Monochrome on Jan 25, 2007 - 16 comments

A periodic table of visualization methods.
posted by fatllama on Jan 7, 2007 - 13 comments

US Census Bureau Facts & Figures: Holiday Edition says that more than 20 billion letters, packages and cards will be delivered this holiday season and 12 million packages a day through to Christmas Eve. Also check out the Special Edition for comparison data from 1915, 1967 and 2006, the African-American History Month Facts & Features and more data going back to 2000.
posted by fenriq on Dec 15, 2006 - 4 comments

Why is Miss Congeniality the most frequently rated DVD on Netflix? Database magic reveals the most contentious movies ever.
posted by muckster on Oct 26, 2006 - 52 comments

Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation an essay by novelist Richard Powers
posted by MetaMonkey on Sep 24, 2006 - 11 comments

Dapper: The Data Mapper
A recently launched service that allows users to extract data from any website into XML, and transform or build applications and mashups with that data. Described by it's creators as a way to, "easily build an API for any website... through a visual and intuitive process". Plagiarism Today, meanwhile, has cause for concern, "Dapper is a scraper. Nothing more... now the technologically impaired can scrape content from any site... the potential danger [is] very, very real".
posted by MetaMonkey on Sep 5, 2006 - 31 comments

Lightweight data exploration: simple, sparkline-esque graphs in Excel.via infosthetics.
posted by signal on Aug 19, 2006 - 15 comments