Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
“For the first time since its launch in 1999, the www.davidrumsey.com website has been completely redesigned and updated. With better navigation and structure, users will find it easier to explore the site's many viewers and collection database with over 21,000 maps online. A new Blog has been added to the site, and includes entries for Recent Additions, News, Featured Maps, Related Sites, and Videos. Over 200 historic maps from the collection can be viewed in a new browser-based version of Google Earth, and users can enter the Second Life version of the map collection directly from a dedicated Second Life portal page on the site. And the collection ticker at the bottom of the home page shows the entire online map library in random order over about 10 hours. As always, all maps can be downloaded for free directly from the site at full resolution. And a new service from Pictopia allows purchase of reproductions of any map in the collection directly from the new LUNA viewing software.”
From Internet Scout </a>:
Cartography 2.0
http://cartography2.org/ “Professor Mark Harrower at the University of Wisconsin Madison's Department of Geography was frustrated with the “inability of traditional textbooks to keep pace with Web technologies.” So he and his colleagues set out to create Cartography 2.0, which is a “free knowledge base and e-textbook for students and professionals interested in interactive and animated maps.” First-time visitors might want to look over the “Purpose” section before diving into the separate “Chapters” of the book. All of the chapters can be found on the homepage, and they cover topics such as map animation, virtual globes, elements of design, and map interaction techniques. Each chapter contains descriptive essays, along with maps and diagrams that illustrate key principles. The “New Content” section on the homepage features the latest additions to the site, and overall this work is a model for educators who might be interested in crafting an engaging and dynamic online textbook.”
Nathan, the guy behind the code at the FlowingData blog, offers up a good how-to set for producing interactive area graph.
You've seen the NameExplorer from the Baby Name Wizard by Martin Wattenberg. It's an interactive area chart that lets you explore the popularity of names over time. Search by clicking on names or typing in a name in the prompt. It's simple. It's sexy. Everybody loves it.
This is a step-by-step guide on how to make a similar visualization in Actionscript/Flash with your own data and how to customize the design for whatever you need. We're after last week's graphic on consumer spending:
This tutorial is for people with at least a little bit of programming experience. I'll try to make it as straightforward as possible, but the concepts might be a little hard to grasp if you've never written a line of code. Just a heads up. Of course it never hurts to try.
If you don't care about customization or integration into an application and don't mind putting your data in the public domain, you could also just dump your data into Many Eyes, and use the Stack Graph.
Like I said, this is all in Actionscript, so before we start anything, I strongly recommend you get Adobe Flex Builder if you don't already have it. You can buy it, get a trial version from the Adobe site, or if you're in education, you can get it for free.
There are ways to compile Actionscript without Flex Builder, but they are more complicated. [read more here]
Good piece on dataviz from Harvard Business Publishing.
John Sviokla The Near Futurist RSS Feed Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization 4:11 PM Friday December 4, 2009 Tags:Information & technology, Knowledge management “A good sketch is better than a long speech…” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte The ability to visualize the implications of data is as old as humanity itself. Yet due to the vast quantities, sources, and sinks of data being pumped around our global economy at an ever increasing rate, the need for superior visualization is great and growing. To give dimension to the size of the challenge, the EMC reports that the “digital universe” added 487 exabytes — or 487 billion gigabytes — in 2008. They project that in 2012, we will add five times as much digital information as we did last year. I believe that we will naturally migrate toward superior visualizations to cope with this information ocean. Since the days of the cave paintings, graphic depiction has always been an integral part of how people think, communicate, and make sense of the world. In the modern world, new information systems are at the heart of all management processes and organizational activities. About ten years ago, I vividly remember visiting the Cabinet War Rooms in the basement of Whitehall, where Churchill had his war room during WW II. The desks were full of phones, and the walls covered with maps and information about troop levels and movements. These used color coded pieces of string to help Churchill's team easily understand what was happening: On the one hand, I was struck by how primitive their information environment was only sixty years ago. But on the other, I found it reassuring to see how similar their approach was to war fighting today. The mode, quality and speed of data capture has changed greatly from the 1940s, but the paradigm for visualization of the terrain, forces, and strategy are almost identical to those of WWII. So, the good news is that even in a world of information surplus, we can draw upon deep human habits on how to visualize information to make sense of a dynamic reality. [more]
4:11 PM Friday December 4, 2009
Tags:Information & technology, Knowledge management
“A good sketch is better than a long speech…” — a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
The ability to visualize the implications of data is as old as humanity itself. Yet due to the vast quantities, sources, and sinks of data being pumped around our global economy at an ever increasing rate, the need for superior visualization is great and growing. To give dimension to the size of the challenge, the EMC reports that the “digital universe” added 487 exabytes — or 487 billion gigabytes — in 2008. They project that in 2012, we will add five times as much digital information as we did last year.
I believe that we will naturally migrate toward superior visualizations to cope with this information ocean. Since the days of the cave paintings, graphic depiction has always been an integral part of how people think, communicate, and make sense of the world. In the modern world, new information systems are at the heart of all management processes and organizational activities.
About ten years ago, I vividly remember visiting the Cabinet War Rooms in the basement of Whitehall, where Churchill had his war room during WW II. The desks were full of phones, and the walls covered with maps and information about troop levels and movements. These used color coded pieces of string to help Churchill's team easily understand what was happening:
On the one hand, I was struck by how primitive their information environment was only sixty years ago. But on the other, I found it reassuring to see how similar their approach was to war fighting today. The mode, quality and speed of data capture has changed greatly from the 1940s, but the paradigm for visualization of the terrain, forces, and strategy are almost identical to those of WWII. So, the good news is that even in a world of information surplus, we can draw upon deep human habits on how to visualize information to make sense of a dynamic reality. [more]
This is a few months old, but we're wondering if any readers have used Hive or tried to deploy it in newsrooms, where “exploring and analyzing data…[is] everyone's responsibility.”
Exploring and analyzing data isn’t the responsibility of one team here at Facebook; it’s everyone’s responsibility. “Move fast” is one of our core values, and to facilitate fast data-driven decisions, the Data Infrastructure Team has created tools like Hive and its UI sidekick, HiPal, to make analyzing Facebook’s petabytes of data easy for anyone in the company. The Data Science team runs open tutorial sessions for groups eager to run their own analysis using these tools. And non-programmers on every team have fearlessly rolled up their sleeves to learn how to write Hive queries.
Today, Facebook counts 29% of its employees (and growing!) as Hive users. More than half (51%) of those users are outside of Engineering. They come from distinct groups like User Operations, Sales, Human Resources, and Finance. Many of them had never used a database before working here. Thanks to Hive, they are now all data ninjas who are able to move fast and make great decisions with data.
If you like to move fast and want to be a data ninja (no matter what team you are in), check out our Careers page.
