Running with Data

links about data, visualization, and music

A Critique of "The Facebook Offering: How It Compares"

Fb_ipo

via nytimes.com

I should begin with an apology: I have long admired the great interactive and print work that the New York Times Graphic Department creates. However, their recent graphic on the Facebook IPO bothered me for three reasons:

  1. Size of IPO is double-encoded. The y-axis gives this information, as does the size of the circle drawn
  2. Time is double-encoded. The x-axis gives the year, as does the color scale
  3. It took me a while to figure out what the color scale was for. Transitioning from red (the past) to blue (the present) through purple (the year 2000), doesn't make any sense to me. 

The double-encodings serve to make the graphic more attractive, but not to inform. 

Information that would be very valuable, but is not surfaced at all, is how all these companies are currently faring. If you hover over a bubble, you can find out how it was doing 3 years after the IPO, but not how it's doing now, or what the trajectory of the stock price was. It would be really great to pull in a line graph of the stock price from the first-day pop to the present when you hover over a company. Color could also be used to represent the ratio of the stock price on the opening day to the current stock price.

Animated Isarithmic Map of 20th century politics, by David Sparks
via quietube2.com. Watch the bigger version on vimeo.

Isarithmic maps are contour maps where color is used to represent another variable. It's interesting to see this approach to visualizing political data instead of choropleth maps, and the interpolation to create a smooth video showing the shifting political tides was a great idea.

David has a lot to say about this style of mapping on his blog.

Interactive Starry Night by Petros Vrellis

via creativeapplications.net

Petros made this with 80,000 particles, and manually traced the flows from the original painting. The whole thing was made with open frameworks. And it's interactive - you can adjust the flows. And the music responds to the flows. An incredible way of making something familiar new and full of wonder.

And it gets better. Petros has released an iPad app, so you can play with it yourself, instead of just watching the video. The app is available in the app store for $2. It's a lot of fun!

Flickr as a paintbrush, by Andy Woodruff

Media_httpwwwcartogra_yvdhk
via andywoodruff.com

As Woodruff points out: "This is not simply a map of colors on the ground . . . it is a map of the colors that people on the ground are looking at".

Very cool idea, combining finding the dominant color for each geotagged picture (he explains that process in his post), and interpolating between the colors to fill in spots where no pictures were taken.

Woodruff's other work is also well worth checking out.

Sentence Drawings: On The Road, visualized by Stefanie Posavec

Media_httpwwwitsbeenr_dcdfi
Sentence_drawings_legend
via itsbeenreal.co.uk

A really interesting visualization of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. The colors correspond to different topics (light brown for "Parties, Drinking & Drugs" and red for "Women, Sex & Relationships"). Each sentence is a line, and after each sentence, a right turn is made. Each word is scaled to .85mm (regardless of word length).

See the gloriously hi-res version here, or buy the poster here. Stefanie's other work is also worth checking out.

If you like this, check out Jeff Clark's Directed Sentence Drawings, which use sentence topic to determine direction (instead of just turning right at each sentence boundary. Jeff's drawings are more compact, but make the order of topic appearance harder to determine.