BLOG POSTS

“The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy” is a new book by Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli presenting his wonderfully perfectionist’s eye for obsessively creating order where there is none.

There is never a short supply of dumb charts, particularly thanks to the totemic uselessness of outlets like Fox news. However, sometimes you see an example that leaves you quite frozen with fascination: How did it come to be? What were they thinking? How many people let this pass through the approval for usage?

A theme of steadily increasing interest to me and many others in the field right now is the ideal of physical data visualisation. Not just visual sculptures as data art but actual tactile representations of data that maintain and offer function.

The video below has been hitting the social media circles today – though curiously not much within/across the data visualisation field – and I thought I would share it as a really great example of using video and narration to explain an interesting data-driven subject.

I’m not always positively struck by social-media related visualisations, however, I do like this Twitter languages map of New York project from James Cheshire, Ed Manley (of CASA) and John Barratt (of Trendsmap) – as well as several others.

Sometimes I find myself lazily defaulting to posting things on twitter but forget that, on occasion, they are of such grand importance that, really, they should be shared with the wider world. Here is one such example.

Thanks to FastCo Exist I’ve come across this interesting use of WebGL to create a 3D interactive visualisation of the world’s carbon emissions.

Earlier this week I posted about the project exploring the impact of Superstorm Sandy. One of the enduring features of this work was the integration of imagery with the core data visualisation interface, expanding the scope of the users’ connection with the event.

I saw some nice techniques being used in this project developed by Derek Watkins and Laura Kurgan from the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University.