A visitor to the Rotten Tomatoes site can check out the data for individual Hollywood careers—that's how Tabarrok came up with the Shyamalan graph—but there's no easy way for users to measure industrywide trends or to compare different actors and directors side-by-side. To that end, Rotten Tomatoes kindly let Slate analyze the scores in its enormous database and create an interactive tool so our readers might do the same.
posted by Trurl on Jun 7, 2011 - 69 comments

Junk Charts and its "sister blog", Numbers Rule the World, are long-running sites with trenchant critiques of the visual and textual display of information in media. Both are instructive for decoding the information glut, as well as getting your own messages across clearly. See for example, posts on display of census information and race; Trying Too Hard; and Over Plotting.
posted by Rumple on Oct 11, 2010 - 5 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

Dozens of the web's best visualization tools. Neat choices include TuneGlue's music map using data from Amazon and last.fm, Packetgarden's weird world grown from your websurfing habits, Akamai's real-time network visualization, the many widgets of last.fm, the hypnotic maps of the mood of blogs from We Feel Fine, the beautiful galleries of Visual Complexity, and a neat list of tools for drawing diagrams. [some prev]
posted by blahblahblah on Mar 14, 2008 - 8 comments

Contrived is the new original. via.
posted by signal on Mar 10, 2007 - 38 comments