Dead Kennedys

A visual overview of Dead Kennedys' five studio albums including quotes of the lyrics, track titles, album titles and their release years, soundwaves, track lengths, song writers and the lyrical themes and their relations.

Musical Nodes

MusicalNodes is a visualization system for digital music collections. Artists, albums, songs and genres are represented as nodes in a network, where musically similar items are connected with each other. A force based graph determines the positions of the nodes, based on data like song tempo, genre and similar artists. It provides a good overview of your music at a glance and offers new insights into your collection.

Health InfoScape

Designed by the team at MIT SENSEable City Lab, Health InfoScape is a disease network that combines 7.2 million patient records from General Electric's proprietary database in an effort to illustrate relationships between various conditions that commonly affect Americans today. It essentially tries to answer questions like: When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you're experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a few pounds, or more? By investigating how different ailments are related, one may gain various insights about condition associations.

Circle of Trust

The Circle of Trust is an interface data-visualization experiment using Google+ API and HTML5. In an effort to understand how asymmetric relationship networks are at Google Plus, the authors made a simple algorithm to visualize who are the people inside your circle of trust and who are the people outside.

Green are the people you have circled and they have circled you back, yellow is for people that you cared to circle but they didn't, and red is for people that have circled you but you didn't care to circle back.

You can map your network directly here.

Sense of Patterns

Sense of Patterns is an on-going project, a series of printed data visualizations aiming to depict the behaviors of masses in different public spaces. The visualizations have a focus on the patterns of moving entities in public like commuters, cars and public transportation vehicles as well as the interaction between these entities and physical structures like roads, sidewalks, buildings and parks. The project intends to provide strong visuals on what we all experience in our daily lives in different cities.

The first image maps 915.353 single entries (unique trip id, timestamps, longitude and latitude coordinates) of taxi trips during the 25th of July, 2011, in the city of Vienna, Austria. The second shows the same data mapped at different periods of the day.

Max Planck Research Networks

This multi-touch installation, on display at the Max Planck Science Gallery, explores how the various Max Planck Institutes collaborate with each other, and with their international partners. Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (MPG) comprises nearly 80 research institutes covering different areas, such as natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. With 32 Nobel Prizes amongst its associated scientists, MPG is one of the most respected scientific institutions in Germany and Europe.

For this graph visualization, the authors analysed data from SciVerse Scopus for over 94,000 publications over the last ten years. The dynamic network provides a high-level map of the Max Planck Institutes and their connections. The size of the institute icons represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines the number of jointly published papers between two institutes.

The network visualization is also accompanied by a map of Max Planck institutes showing their respective locations, and a world map disclosing the locations of external collaboration partners.

Touching an institute icon on the multitouch screen centers the view around it and highlights its most important collaboration partners, both in the network as well as on the maps. Visitors can move and zoom all views by touching and "pinching" (moving two fingers together or apart). The international flow of ideas is represented metaphorically by streams of energy particles, being continuously exchanged between the institutions.

Global Pulse

Twitter is a remarkable tool to analyze information diffusion, and investigate social patterns and trends. In June 2011, Abdur Chowdhury and his team at Twitter posted a few visualization experiments covering the volume and worldwide scale of Twitter messages during the devastating earthquake in Japan on March 11.

As they stated on the original post: "During major events, people use Twitter to share news and thoughts with friends, family and followers around the world. Messages originating in one place are quickly spread across the globe through Retweets, @replies and Direct Messages. We see this behavior during everything from sporting events like the World Cup to widely-televised news events like the royal wedding, and also in the face of major disasters like the March 11 earthquake in Japan, where the volume of Tweets sent per second spiked to more than 5,000 TPS five separate times after the quake and ensuing tsunami."

To better understand this diffusion process, Abdur and his team created two video clips. The first image is from a clip showing the volume of @replies traveling into and out of Japan in a one-hour period just before and then after the earthquake. Replies directed to users in Japan are shown in pink; messages directed at others from Japan are shown in yellow.

The second one is from a clip displaying worldwide retweets of Tweets originating in Japan for one hour after the earthquake. Senders' original Tweets are shown in pink; Tweets retweeted by their followers in the hour after the event are displayed in green.

Wikipedia Edits During the Middle-East Protests

The images shown here are from a short, dynamic visualization of edits to Wikipedia pages from December 1st to February 20th, 2011. It focuses on pages about nations where protests and revolutions occurred as well as pages about the protests themselves. Edits are color-coded by type, with orange-red lines indicating changes that added to a page whereas purple indicates changes that removed text from a page.

Each pulse is a day, but the graph actually displays the current day plus any edits that occurred that day or during the prior six days, so it's actually showing a week of edits at a time.

The editing was visualized in Gephi, an open-source network analysis package.

Discovr

After releasing the great Discovr Music app for the iPad, Filter Squad recently launched Discovr, a visualization app that behaves as a recommendation engine for Apple's large repository of apps.

Discovr provides an interactive map of the App Store and makes its easy to discover new apps for the iPhone & iPad. It has been a Number 1 app in 17 countries including the US, Japan, Australia, and Germany.

Nike+ City Runs

Nike+ involves the placement of a sensor underneath the footbed of your Nike running shoe in order to collect data about where you've run, how long it took and where you can improve over time - since each individual run becomes part of a collective historical database. Even though Nike+ website already gives individual users a variety of features to make sense of their personal data, the collective analysis of this growing database is remarkably promising.

The interactive collective YesYesNo developed an installation for Nike's retail stores to visualize a year's worth of runs uploaded to the Nike+ website. With custom software, the installation plays back runs throughout three cities: New York, London and Tokyo. The runs showed tens of thousands of peoples' runs animating the city and bringing it to life. The software visualizes and follows individual runs, as well as showing the collective energy of all the runners, defining the city by the constantly changing paths of the people running in it.

Visualising traffic on img.ly

During Nodecamp 2011, the members of 9elements - a small company dedicated to web applications - were eager to present a live tracker built with node.js. Inspired by Paul Butler's Facebook Map, the team decided to go with data from img.ly, a popular social photo sharing service that happens to be the image service of Twitterrific.

The visualization they ended up creating shows the live activity of visitors on img.ly as a series of dynamic arcs across the globe. Each arc starts with the location of the visitor and ends with the location of the image the visitor is looking at.

As the authors explain, they were particularly interested in disclosing hidden connections within img.ly: "There are already many apps plotting visitors on a map, so obviously this was not very interesting. We were interested in connections, and basically there is already a very important type of connection on img.ly. Whenever you call a picture on img.ly, you create a connection to the user who posted it. We can apply this idea to location, thus all we had to do was to connect the location of visitors with the location of the picture they're viewing. That's the idea."

Opinion Cloud

It's always fascinating to see network visualization being embraced by mainstream media in a prominent way. This has lately been the case of The Economist, which now features an advanced form of interconnected tag cloud in many of its online articles. This "opinion cloud" aggregates all user commentary by readers of The Economist and creates relevant connections between emergent topics, regions, and countries. It was made possible by a collaboration between Appinions opinion extraction technology and Infomous text visualization.

See something or say something

Eric Fischer, who has been previously featured in VC, produced a new set of striking visualizations mapping Flickr and Twitter against each other.

The maps from different cities and areas around the globe depict geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr (orange) versus geotagged tweets to Twitter (blue). In case an image and a tweet originate from the same location, it appears as a white dot. The first image is a map of Europe using the described visualization method, while the second one is a map of New York City.

You can read more about the project at a Fast Company's Co.Design article on Fischer's work.

Visualizing Databases

Using the visualization tool Gephi, Elijah Meeks has produced a series of experiments depicting databases in diverse styles. The images show here are mapping the top contributors to the Catalogue of Life and their associated species, references and databases.

As Elijah states: "While it could be argued that all databases can be devolved into graph databases, and as such all databases are graphs and therefore networks in the most pure sense, I think that there's something more practical at play here: the importance of network visualization for database aesthetics. Summaries and statistics drawn from within the structure of the database are not enough. If there is to be any real grappling with the database as an culturally-embedded construct, then it has to be done in a manner that reveals the data, the model and the population simultaneously."

Software Evolution Storylines

Inspired by the remarkable xkcd webcomic visual language, Michael Ogawa created a series of visualizations mapping collaborative efforts of various developers in a variety of tools and programming languages, such as Apache or Python.

Data comes from the project repository logs. Time flows horizontally from left to right. At each timestep (usually a month) developers are clustered by the files they modify. A histogram at the bottom shows the volume and type of file committed. You can mouse-over individual lines to see them better.

The two images shown here display the collaborations between developers of Apache (a popular webserver) during the first two years of planning and documentation of its 2.0 branch.

Travel Times on Commuter Rail

This map shows the travel times, in minutes, from Manhattan to stations in the region's commuter rail system during the evening rush. Each alternating ring shows how much farther you can travel in an additional 15 minutes. Inbound times may differ.

Lines that appear to double back on themselves indicate when stations farther from Manhattan have shorter travel times because they are served by express trains. Color-coding indicates how fast, on average, thetrain travels to reach each station, from red (15-25 mph) to green (45+ mph).

Travel times are based on trains departing Penn Station (New Jersey Transit, L.I.R.R.) or Grand Central Terminal (Metro-North) between 4 and 7 pm on weekdays. An average of the three fastest trains was used to capture the effect of express trains. Local trains may take significantly longer.

Mapping God's Bloodline

This is a genealogical map of Jesus, from the creation of Adam and Eve through Noah, the tribes of Israel, King David, and finally Joseph and Mary. It includes everyone whose ancestry can be directly traced all the way back to Adam and Eve according to the biblical record.

The map shows only father-son and father-daughter relationships, with the exception of Mary, who is shown as the spouse of Joseph and the mother of Jesus. Some relationships may also indicate a more distant ancestry than the usual father-child lineage.

Red indicates the bloodline from God the Father to God the Son, Jesus Christ. Other colors show the twelve tribes of Israel (descendants of Jacob).

Mapped Wiki

Using the Wikipedia API this visualization tool grabs the articles that are linked to a main Wikipedia entry and counts all the categories that those articles belong to, while also exposing the most popular ones and their respective links. Wikipedia categories provide a good measure of article relevance since they are assigned by various individual users.

Mapping Wikileaks

This is a partial map of the 11,616 WikiLeaks Iraq SIGACT ("significant action") reports from December 2006, the bloodiest month of the war. Each report is a dot. Each dot is labelled by the three most "characteristic" words in that report. Documents that are "similar" have edges drawn between them. The location of the dot is abstract and not based on geography. Instead, dots with edges between them are pulled closer together. This produces a series of clusters, which are labelled by the words that are most "characteristic" of the reports in that cluster.

It's mapping 3,051 nodes (26.3% of 11,616 documents), connected by 106,660 edges, and 17,608 terms. The highest incidence (44,61%) relates to criminal events, with enemy action (29.47%) and explosive hazard (16.72%) following behind.

Envisioning Technology

Researched and designed by technologist Michell Zappa, Envisioning Technology is a speculative and subjective overview of potential future technologies. Based on personal research and observations, this map is intended to facilitate predictions of where the technium is going, as well as provoke thought and stimulate debate.

Due to the intrinsic difficulty of speculation, the visualization is not to be interpreted as a roadmap, but rather as a point of reference for those investigating (or designing) the future of technology.

Each hub represents an important area of development to which actual technologies (shown as nodes) belong. The center of the map marks where we are today, and the further out points indicate how far into the future each technology is predicted to become mainstream. The visualization also attempts to distinguish the predicted importance of each area, shown by the relative size of the nodes.

Global Agenda Councils Constellation

In November 2010 the World Economic Forum gathered in Dubai to discuss issues on the global agenda. Before the forum, the 700 members of each of the 72 Global Agenda Councils were asked which other councils they would benefit from interacting with. This data was then released to the public as part of a visualization challenge organized by visualizing.org.

Seattle Band Map

The Seattle Band Map is a project that showcases the northwest's vibrant music scene by documenting the thousands of bands who have performed throughout the decades; it also explores how these bands are interconnected through personal relationships and collaborations.

This project aims to diversify the audience for and broaden the understanding of Seattle's music scene, while spotlighting unrepresented artists and musical genres. Seattle has long been known as a hotbed of musical creativity, from the thriving 60s and early 70s Soul and Funk scene, to the 90s grunge movement. Music continues to thrive in Seattle, and the authors see the Seattle Band Map as an opportunity to keep it in the forefront of people's minds.

The three bands with a highest number of connections are The Unnatural Helpers (43), Oldominion (38), and Your Heart Breaks (30), while the most popular in the map are Nirvana, The Unnatural Helpers, and Pearl Jam.

Chondrus Crispus

This is the eighth representation of a natural system to be showcased in VC. Within the vast VC database there are only a few projects that are not a human interpretation of reality, but a direct snapshot of nature's complex beauty.

The first image, taken by Andrea Ottesen, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, won first place (tie) at the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The fractal otherworldly image is of Irish moss (Chondrus crispus), a common seaweed species on the Atlantic coast. This particular specimen was captured off Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The second image is a drawing of Chondrus crispus by renowned biologist Ernst Haeckel, which appeared in the 65th plate of Haeckel's remarkable Kunstformen der Natur (1904).

From Wikipedia: "Chondrus crispus, known under the common name Irish moss, or carrageen moss (Irish carraig�n, "little rock"), is a species of red algae which grows abundantly along the rocky parts of the Atlantic coast of Europe and North America. In its fresh condition the plant is soft and cartilaginous, varying in color from a greenish-yellow, through red, to a dark purple or purplish-brown. The principal constituent of Irish moss is a mucilaginous body, made of the polysaccharide carrageenan of which it contains about 55%. The plant also consists of nearly 10% protein and about 15% mineral matter, and is rich in iodine and sulfur. When softened in water it has a sea-like odour, and because of the abundant cell wall polysaccharides it will form a jelly when boiled, containing from 20 to 100 times its weight of water."