The Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes

Taxes are probably one of the most stressful and depressing times of year, am I right?  In an attempt to gleam a bit of useful and, dare I say, Interesting information from the annual mundane task, Google has partnered up with Eyebeam to create the “Data Viz Challenge”

To make that happen, we’ve teamed up with Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center, to host what we’re calling the Data Viz Challenge. Andrew and Louis have built an API to let anyone access the data, so now you can choose how to display it. Could you create a better animated chart? Something in 3D? An interactive website? A physical display somewhere in the real world? We want you to show everyone how data visualization can be a powerful tool for turning information into understanding.

The challenge ends March 27th, 2011 and is open to U.S. entries only, but the lucky winner will get a nice $5,000 prize.

The Challenge: Visualize Your Taxes | DataVizChallenge.org.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.