Boing Boing » dataviz

Realtime map of anonymous edits to Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:59:25 +0000

Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi's "Wikipedia Recent Changes Map" plots anonymous edits to Wikipedia on a world-map in realtime, based on the location of the user (only anonymous users are identified by IP address, so they're the only ones whose locations can be estimated). It's a hypnotic view into Wikipedia's casual users and vandals, as well as unobservant users like (I often forget that I'm logged out until after my edit, and have to go back and add an attribution).

When an unregistered user makes a contribution to Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to the contributor’s approximate geographic location. A study by Fabian Kaelin in 2011 noted that unregistered users make approximately 20% of the edits on English Wikipedia [edit: likely closer to 15%, according to more recent statistics], so Wikipedia’s stream of recent changes includes many other edits that are not shown on this map.
You may see some users add non-productive or disruptive content to Wikipedia. A survey in 2007 indicated that unregistered users are less likely to make productive edits to the encyclopedia. Do not fear: improper edits can be removed or corrected by other users, including you!
This map listens to live feeds of Wikipedia revisions, broadcast using wikimon. We built the map using a few nice libraries and services, including d3, DataMaps, and freegeoip.net. This project was inspired by WikipediaVision’s (almost) real-time edit visualization.

Wikipedia Recent Changes Map

Census Dotmap: a dot for every person in the United States

Dean Putney — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:56:08 +0000

Cartography and data analysis nut Brandon M-Anderson put together this impressive zoomable map of the United States with one dot for each of the 308,450,225 people recorded by the 2010 census: oddities revealed include people living in "abandoned" areas or parks. A Redditor stitched the tiles into a huge image.

Dataviz for "My Ideal Bookshelf"

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:40:27 +0000

Fred sez, "My lady, Thessaly La Force, recently published a book with the artist Jane Mount called 'My Ideal Bookshelf.' In it, Thessaly interviews over 100 people and Jane paints their bookshelves. As I observed Jane and Thessaly compile the book over the last year, I couldn't help but think about all the fun opportunities I could have exploring the data behind the shelves. Each of the 101 contributors Thessaly interviewed picked as many books as they thought represented their ideal bookshelf, and I knew some of them would pick identical books. What would the most popular book be (it was Lolita)? On average, how many books did people choose? What would a taste graph linking contributors to each other using the books on their shelves look like? So I pulled the data together into a set of graphs an interactive 3D plot that visualizes the relationships of the contributors based on the books they choose."

The Data Behind My Ideal Bookshelf (Thanks, Fred!)

Silcon Valley's high-tech bus commuter lines visualized

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:38:40 +0000

Stamen, a design firm in San Francisco, was commissioned to study the private transport networks that run from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley. The traditional commuter dynamic for cities is suburbanites coming into the city to work, but in San Francisco it runs both ways, as city-dwelling tech workers catch a variety of semi-luxurious, WiFi-equipped buses with power outlets and work tables to tech campuses down the peninsula. I watched this with some amusement when I was in San Francisco this summer, observing how a crowd of googlers with Android handsets would magically converge on a corner near Dolores Park just as a big black Google bus pulled up and whisked them away (A friend at Google tells me that his bus has its own mailing list where they recently had a kerfuffle when some enthusiastic people proposed a weekly festive party-ride on Friday afternoons, to the horror of the more sedate riders).

Fun fact: apparently Twitter employees refer to the entire Mission district as "the campus" (though I assume that this is ironic).

We enlisted people to go to stops, measure traffic and count people getting off and on and we hired bike messengers to see where the buses went. The cyclists used Field Papers to transcribe the various routes and what they found out, which we recompiled back into a database of trips, stops, companies and frequency. At a rough estimate, these shuttles transport about 35% of the amount of passengers Caltrain moves each day. Google alone runs about 150 trips daily, all over the city.
We wanted to simplify that, to start thinking about it as a system rather than a bunch of buses, so we began paring down the number of stops by grouping clusters where the stops were close to each other.
The subway map is the end result of that simplification; it's not a literal representation, but it's much more readable than the actual routes. We also wanted to show the relative volumes, so the map segments are scaled by how many trips pass through them; you get a sense for just how much traffic the highways get, and how the routes branch out from there to cover the city. We only mapped San Francisco shuttles, many of these companies operate additional routes in East Bay, the Pennensula, and around San Jose, including direct routes from Caltrain stations to corporate campuses.

The work was commissioned by ZERO1 and partly funded by the James Irvine Foundation.

The City from the Valley (2012) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

London mapped by common surnames

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:00:30 +0000

James Cheshire (Department of Geography, UCL) produced a series of interactive maps of London that show the relationship of common surnames to different neighbourhoods:

This map shows the 15 most frequent surnames in each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) across Greater London. The colours represent the origin of the surname (*not necessarily* the person) derived from UCL’s Onomap Classification tool. The surnames have also been scaled by their total frequency in each MSOA.

London Names (via Sociological Images)

Visualizing GOP presidential candidate approval ratings as 3D printed buttplugs

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:07 +0000

Matthew Epler's Grand Old Party project takes the approval-rating curves of GOP presidential hopefuls and turns them into 3D solids, then turns those into buttplugs.

Grand Old Party demonstrates that as a people united, our opinion has real volume. When we approve of a candidate, they swell with power. When we deem them unworthy, they are diminished and left hanging in the wind. We guard the gate! It opens and closes at our will. How wide is up to us.
In an age of information, we rely on hard facts. Each of the shapes you see here come directly from poll data collected by Gallup. This data reflects approval ratings for each GOP candidate among registered Republican voters from December 10, 2011 to April 1, 2012. Each shape’s girth is a reflection of popularity while their height is a reflection of time.
The contours of these delightful shapes conjure up the waves of amber grain and those lapping at the rim of our great nation spanning from sea to shining sea. As the battle for the Presidency rails on, we must remember that Americans may may have achieved freedom through war, but they are also a people of love. After all, in the end all we have is each other.

3D Printing and wonders of the Internet

Update: Derp. It's a dupe.

Relative size of great grey owl's body to feathers

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:00:02 +0000

Here's a diagram that shows the relative size of a great grey owl's body to its feathers. It's hosted on Wikimedia commons, labelled "Cross sectioned taxidermied Great Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa, showing the extent of the body plumage, Zoological Museum, Copenhagen."

File:Strix nebulosa plumage.jpg (via Beth Pratt)

Data viz: whom did the UK government invite to emergency talks about the health reform bills?

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:40:26 +0000

Dr Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre sez, "I did a really sophisticated and complex data visualisation. I think you might enjoy it. There's definitely a pattern in there, I just need to decide what statistical tests will best extract the signal from the noise."

Who is, and is not, invited to Cameron's emergency NHSbill summit? A data visualisation.

Money is the dark matter of American elections: visualizing political donations since Citizens United

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:39:32 +0000

Mike from Mother Jones sez, "For our upcoming "dark money" print package, we chartified the known galaxy of outside political spending groups by their size. As you can see, we ended up with red giants and blue dwarfs."

If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here's the parallel universe it formed: rapidly expanding super-PACs and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting their gravitational pull on federal elections. A group's size in the chart below is based upon all known fundraising or spending since 2010…so keep an eye out for dark matter. Come back for regular updates.

The Crazily Expanding Political Money Universe (Thanks, Mike!)

Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:31:44 +0000

Occupy George presents data about US wealth disparity as a series of data-visualizations that are intended to be overprinted on US dollar bills. The visualizations are available as templates to turned into rubber stamps, or inkjet-printed overtop of US currency that is first lightly affixed to sheets of paper.

(via Beth Pratt)

Occupy George [occupygeorge.com]

Keyboard whose keys are raised in proportion to their frequency of use

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:40:08 +0000

Mike Kneupfel, a student at NYU's Interactive Technology Program, made a 3D model showing the keys he presses most frequently when typing, composed of raised keys on a keyboard. It's a fun and eye-catching way of visualizing data by using the thing whose data you're analyzing.

Conclusions - This was just a first go at trying to create a data driven 3d sculpture. I wound up scaling the keys a little bit too much in the vertical direction. The weight of the tall keys caused the towers to tilt at an angle. I plan on showing this prototype to a few people that will hopefully give me more ideas for new data sets to look at. I want to try and use the CNC for future data driven sculptures. I also want to try and include color into the sculpture somehow.

Keyboard Frequency Sculpture (via Neatorama)

Worst PowerPoint slides

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 27 May 2011 06:18:32 +0000

The winners of InFocus's Worst PPT Slide Contest are astonishing examples of unintentional obfuscation, baffling bullshit and design nightmares.

Worst PPT Slide Contest Winners (via Neatorama)

(Image: via @pinwale)

UK gov't launches terrorism-attack dashboard contest

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:27:55 +0000

Glyn sez, "The UK government has launched a competition to improve gathering and analysing publicly available data to gain an understanding of current events": "The aim of this competition is to stimulate development of innovative tools that allow the collection and analysis of live data streams in real time in order to identify trends, build a common picture and monitor, manage and influence events as they occur. INSTINCT is particularly interested in applying these tools to the analysis and management of terrorist incidents." (Thanks, Glyn!)

Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:06:41 +0000

David Weinberger sez, "Notabilia has visualized the hundred longest discussion threads at Wikipedia that resulted in the deletion of an article and the hundred that did not. The visualized threads take on shapes depending on whether the discussion was controversial, swinging, or unanimous. For those whose brains can process visualized information (as mine cannot), you will undoubtedly learn much. For the rest of us: Oooooh, pretty! They also have analyzed data using words. E.g., Delete decisions tend to be unanimous."

Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia (Thanks, DavidJoho, via Submitterator!)

Dataviz: 200 years' worth of economic and health data from 200 countries

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:41:21 +0000

From an episode of BBC Four's The Joy of Stats, watch as charming and animated Swedish statistician Hans Rosling runs through 200 years' worth of augmented-reality data-visualization telling the story of economic development and health in 200 countries over 200 years in a mere four minutes.

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four (Thanks, Alan!)

23 years' worth of soap opera romance condensed into 6 minutes

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 07:50:13 +0000

Here's a sweet little animation spelling out 23 years' worth of the complex interpersonal relationships on The Bold and the Beautiful, a soap-opera, visualized with artists' maquettes and liberal use of connecting lines and narration.

Beautiful LAB - EPISODE 0 in English: The Bold and the Beautiful in 6 minutes

Charts of UK Parliamentary language usage, 1935-

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 May 2010 02:28:08 +0000

Amy sez,

We analysed the use of language in UK parliament debates from December 1935 to March 2010. The terms of recent Prime Ministers are highlighted at the bottom of each graph for reference. It's also worth keeping in mind that Alistair Campbell became Director of Communications for the Labour Government in the year 2000.
We used the parliamentary debates raw data provided by the excellent They Work For You website. Common words (the, at, honorable, minister, in, of, order, debate, sir, and so on) and infrequently used words were removed, with the remaining words grouped into a database by year. Note that the data for the years 1935 and 2010 is incomplete -- we only used the data from the 26th November 1935 to 31st March 2010 -- and so the statistics for the first and final years may not be reliable.
Each year differs in the number of debates, and hence volume of data. Therefore, rather than analysing the absolute count of usage for each word, we instead compared the count of each word against the total number words recorded in our database for the year -- resulting in a percentage, which is more reliably comparable across years.

An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Language: 1935-2010 (Thanks, Amy!)

BBC to project real-time election results on Big Ben's tower

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:03:58 +0000

This is pretty cool: The BBC is going to project the real-time UK election results on the sides of Big Ben's tower, as a skinny bar-chart showing the progress of the three front running parties as individual lines, with the independent parties lumped into a combined bar. BBC to beam general election results on to Big Ben (via O'Reilly Radar)

HOWTO spot a handgun, the beautiful information edition

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:51:02 +0000

Back in 2007, Edward Tufte featured Megan Jaegerman's NYT graphic on spotting a hidden handgun (click through below for the whole thing). It's not only informative, it's also beautiful. The same page features many of Jaegerman's other NYT graphics, each a little work of information art.

Megan Jaegerman's brilliant news graphics (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Previously:

Word-map of net-censorship in China

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:23:11 +0000

Adapted from the book Information is Beautiful, this infographic showing sites and search terms censored by China's Great Firewall.

(Thanks, Marilyn!)

Previously:

Measuring font ink-use by hand-drawing sample text with ball-point pens

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:56:48 +0000

Clever work by Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth: they drew the same piece of sample text in several fonts at large scale using transparent Bic pens, then measured the remaining ink in the barrels to show the comparative consumption used by each face. Yes, you could probably write some code that calculated the area used by the faces described in their PostScript files, but where would the fun be in that?

Measuring Type (via Kottke)

Superb data-visualization of UK government spending

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:23:38 +0000

Yishay sez, "The good people of the Open Knowledge Foundation have just released a prototype of their visualisation tool for UK gov spending. This on the same week that the government announced radical plans for opening their data. Open data needs to be seen, not just done."

I'm loving this: you can click on any of those dots (on the actual web-page) to see what it represents. The slider moves you back and forth year-to-year. It's an amazing way of visualizing public spending.

Where Does My Money Go? (Thanks, Yishay!)

Previously:

Map of Wikipedia article-density by nation

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:25:21 +0000

Here's a fascinating heat map showing the number of geotagged Wikipedia articles by country. It's a map of the "known unknowns" -- areas where there are likely to be many articles still to write.

Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content

Previously: