Ben Shoemate's Notebook

"Who's talking about breast cancer?" by "socially conscious information visualization firm" Periscopic reveals the currently ongoing discussions on the topic of breast cancer on Twitter.

First, about 1,500 relevant tweets captured within the last 7 hours are collected in a single view that resembles a slowly gravitating space galaxy. Each tweet appears as a unique particle, of which the size depends on how many times it has been retweeted. This highly dense but intuitive view can then be interactively explored and filtered by 3 different interests: 'topics', 'stories' and 'people'. For instance, 'topics' reveals the most used keywords that appeared within these messages (which uses some clever multi-color-coding of the particles to denote overlapping keyword usage), 'stories' show the web links tow external stories that were linked in these tweets, and 'people' ranks the most 'active' Twitter users for this theme.

I guess Google Correlate [googlelabs.com] is a dream come true for any person appreciating statistics and social science (or just likes to explore which line graphs match up). It is Google's newest addition to its already rich and powerful collection of data tools, which already include Google Data Explorer, Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, Google Fusion Tables, Google Visualization API, Google Chart API, or Google Wonder Wheel. The online service allows users to find search query patterns which correspond with those of real-world trends, such as those that correlate with winter time (i.e. 'alpine touring', 'colds' and 'wedding soup').

Alternatively, users can upload their own time series data, and let Google's algorithmic wizardry and computing power let do all the hard work in identifying the search queries that match best over time (e.g. those that match 'visualization' or 'crisis'). In addition, queries can be correlated according to their location according to U.S. states, so that it becomes a statistical fact that the annual geographic distribution of rainfall corresponds to search queries like 'Disney vacation packages', 'mildew remover' or 'pink raincoats'.

Oh, and if you really want to know: 'infosthetics' correlates best with 'wikipedia how' and 'tn580', a Brother laser printer.

In other words, Google Correlate provides a glimpse in our our crowd-sourced psyche like never before.

More information available at the Official Google Blog.

Placebook [geographics.cz] aims to provide a visual overview on how Facebook users are distributed around the world. As a unique feature, any Facebook users can log into the system, in order to receive a map and all relational statistics about their own personal friend network.

The map has been designed in the typical Facebook blue style, and includes a small data graphics dashboard showing the absolute counts of users per country, the proportion of users within a population, and the distribution per age group. Not surprisingly, this project was the 2010 winner of the NACIS Student Web Mapping Competition.

See also Mapping Facebook Connections and Project Palantir.

Twitter Dots [twitterdots.com] translates individual tweets as simple dots on a geographical world map. It is as simple as that. The actual keyword changes each day.

Still interesting to observe how a timeline animation shows some people still tweet "Good Morning" in the late evening... That or the geographical location might be off for a lot of people (e.g. overseas holidays?).

More information is available here.

If you are just like me, you might have been anxiously waiting for the day Nicholas Felton would finally release the 6th volume of the infographic series titled the "Feltron Annual Reports". Back in 2005, it set the beginning of the crazy and potentially self-destructing "viral" infographic rage we know all too well today.

So here is version 2010 [feltron.com], visually seductive and detailed as ever, revealing various personal self-tracking parameters that range from international travels and weather reports to US naturalizations and electrocardiogram measurements.

The catch? This year's report seems not to deal about Nicholas Felton himself, but focuses solely on his father, reconstructed by the calendars, slides and other artifacts in Nicholas' possession.

Enjoy!

See also:
. Interview with Felton.
. Video Interview with Felton
. Feltron 2009 Annual Report
. Feltron 2008 Annual Report
. Feltron 2007 Annual Report
. Feltron 2006 Annual Report
. Feltron 2005 Annual Report

For anyone blessed with a LinkedIn account, this might be quite interesting: InMaps [linkedinlabs.com] is new service that visualizes the collection of a LinkedIn 'connections' as a single network graph. The work was clearly inspired by the results from the interactive visualization and exploration platform Gephi, as Mathieu Bastian, the driving force behind the Gephi project, now works at LinkedIn Labs.

Each color corresponds to a different group within the professional network, which can be labeled by the user. The graph should allow users to recognize connections that share mutual people, or indentify areas that might be underrepresented.

See also Career Paths.

Thnkx Nicholas and Armando.

Better World Flux [betterworldflux.com] is an impressive interactive data visualization created as an entry for the World Bank Apps for Development competition. The project aims to raise awareness for the UN Millennium Development Goals by letting users visualize and share the valuable stories that are hidden in the World Bank Open Data.

Flux basically consists of a powerful histogram view that summarizes the world state for a given year, with the color green representing 'good', and red being 'bad'. Within each color band, a number of countries are aggregated. The width of Flux ribbon corresponds to the total number of people living in those countries. Each country has a color based on a composite score calculated as the geometric mean of the user-selected indicators for any given year. These indicators can include aspects like 'Average years of total schooling', 'Happiness', 'Ratio of female to male primary enrollment', 'Access to Water', or 'Prevalence of HIV'. Users can thus choose the specific indicators and countries, explore the resulting histogram for trends and patterns over time, and share the resulting visualizations online.

Thnkx David!

There is the data, and there is the understanding. Somewhere in the middle, the communication. Also visual. See a list of current visualizations of the WikiLeaks Cable Gate data below.

Interactive Visualization
. The Guardian - US embassy cables: browse the database
. Der Spiegel - "The US Embassy Dispatches Interactive Atlas"
. WikiLeaks - "Graphics of the cablegate dataset" (scroll to bottom, created with Tableau Public)
. The New York Times - "Letters between Wikileaks and the U.S. Government" (not really visualizations)(yet?)

Infographics
- The Guardian - "Where are the Wikileaks Cables From?"
. El Pais - "El intercambio de documentos y las zonas calientes del planeta"
. Jef Thorp - " Exploratory Visualization of the Wikileaks #cablegate data"

Data
. Wikileaks
- The Guardian Data Blog

More lists of sources also at Infographics News and datavisualization.ch.

Please add more sources in the comments!