Ben Shoemate's Notebook

UPDATE: Oops, hold your programming skills: according to the official rules: "this Challenge is open to users who are physically located in the United States". This seems outdated on so many levels...
Thnkx @driven_by_data

There isn't a real shortage of data visualization competitions lately, as high-profile magazines, communities, ngo's, and popular blogs left and right seem to continuously encourage the home-based information designer to come out and demonstrate their talent in terms of making complex data comprehensible and enjoyable to explore.

The latest contestant in this search for the best visualization designer (or should I say, the next employee?) is Google, who, together with Eyebeam, just announced their profound interest in both federal tax numbers as well as interactive bubble graphs.

This naturally all culminates in an ambitious Data Viz Challenge [datavizchallenge.org], which will be juried by viz gurus like Aaron Koblin and Jonathan Harvis.

Each competition entry must use the data from WhatWePayFor.com, be graphical, and have some legible relationship to the underlying data. That somehow legible relationship though, as they describe here, must be excellent in terms of storytelling, clarity, relevance, utility, and... aesthetics.

So, what are you waiting for?

"The Illusion of Diversity: Visualizing Ownership in the Soft Drink Industry" [msu.edu] consists of an elaborate cluster diagram of all the soft drink brands and varieties found in the refrigerator cases of about 100 Michigan retailers, along with their ownership or licensing connections.

It reveals the occurrence of "pseudovariety," or the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice, as only 3 firms control 89% of US soft drink sales (i.e. Coca Cola, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group). The survey included a complete inventory of soft drinks in the refrigerator cases of 94 different food retailers. It recorded 987 varieties of soft drinks, sold under 195 brands, and 102 parent companies. But over 300 varieties were found in only one store each.

What is Data Visualization? How can it be explained through a visual diagram? Can data visualization be... visualized?

David McCandless answered this recursive issue on his impressive blog Information is Beautiful already a while ago, with a 4-layered vendiagram graph that combines the concepts of "Interestingness", "Function", "Form" and "Integrity".

More recently, FFunction attempted to simplify the depiction of data visualization further by proposing a classic 3-layered vendiagram that mash the areas: "Information" , "Design" and "Communication", with its many intermediate steps.

It actually does not necessarily stop there: we proposed back in 2007 (PDF), the combination of "Aesthetics", "Data" and "Interaction".

You can compare the three approaches below.

Are there more models around? Do you have any preferences?