VizWorld.com

MediaBistro pointed me to Stanford University’s  nice interactive visualization of the evolution of journalism and newspapers covering everything from 1690 to today.  Initially it’s showing the migrations westward across the US, but as the country is populated you can see some of the natural ebb & flow of journalism nationwide.

Through the sidebar content as you scroll through the timeline, you get a feel for the different “eras” of newspapering, from the colonies to the frontier to yellow journalism and merger mania. It’s actually somewhat encouraging to read about the journalism crises of decades/centuries past. Being a journalist these days can see like you’re in the worst of times, but really, newspapers and journalism is just constantly evolving, and as you see in the map, it ebbs and it flows.

Data Visualization: Journalism’s Voyage West | Rural West Initiative.

Graphics interactive, journalism, timeline

LinkedIn has just come out with another fun way to visualize your social network and employment history via the “Connection Timeline”.  It plots your history on a short timeline, and then lets you scrub back and forth across it to see your various connections at that time come and go.  It’s surprisingly effective, especially when you see (as I did) someone who you work with now pop up from an old job (or school) that you never knew was actually there.

LinkedIn Connection Timeline.

Graphics interactive, linkedin, timeline

Michael Friendly and Daniel Denis have compiled an amazing timeline of milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization.

This page provides a graphic overview of the events in the history of data visualization that we call “milestones.” These milestones are shown below in the the form of an interactive timeline. The timeline is divided into two vertical sections. You can drag each section left or right to see milestones of different time periods. You can also click one of the links at the bottom of the timeline to jump to a particular epoch.

Including everything from USA Today to the S Language, from Sparklines to camera obscura, it’s an amazing collection of data.

Hat tip to Sean Ahern for pointing this out.

via Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization.

Science history, timeline, visualization

Here’s an interesting way to visualizing a timeline.  Categories of activity are shown around the wheel, while concentric rings visualize time of day.

For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel” chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet. It shows (zoom in) where — at work, at home, in a restaurant, or in the car — people are when they read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio throughout a typical day. Lighter hues correspond to higher levels of activity.

Personally, I would have flipped the axes (map time around the circle, like a clock, with concentric rings to indicate activities).  That would give an interesting biorhythm type of visualization, especially if “sleep” was one of the categories.

via Hill Holliday Blog » Visualizing Daily Activities With Media Wheel.

Graphics research, timeline, visualization

We’ve talked a bit about Timeplots before, but now they have a new pair of visualizations for everyone interested in politics:  one focusing on the Republican party, and one focusing on the Democratic party.

It places each party event in historical context, visualizing a remarkable range of party events, legislation, election results, and leadership to succinctly tell the story of the party. Narratives are displayed within the larger context of party strength by aggregating and annotating data on presidential elections, Congress, Governorships and State Legislatures. The Timeplot provides a new lens into American political history; it is not intended to be absorbed at a glance, but rather to be visited and revisited over time.

Each one is available as a 36″x24″ poster for $30, or get the pair for $50.

A Visual History of the Republican Party | timeplots.com. and Visual History of the Democratic Party

Graphics infographic, political, poster, timeline, timeplots

An absolutely massive interactive HTML-based graphic shows the timeline of your favorite Linux distributions.  With the left side presenting 1992′s Debian, Redhat, and SLS, it shows how the various distributions we know today came into existence.  Follow the lines to the right as they branch into CentOS, Fedora, Tinfoil Hat, Knoppix, Freespire, and many many more.  Click on each name to be taken to the home site for that selected distribution.

A great way to visualize the massive fork and merge trees of Linux.

GNU/Linux distro timeline.

Graphics infographic, linux, timeline

Venkatraman.S has a new prototype visualization technique he calls ‘ChronoDrop’, an interesting combination of timelines and spatial maps to represent the timing of certain events across various timelines.

I always liked Subway Maps – they are easy to understand and also look visually pleasing. And then i stumbled on the following visualization wherein Subway Maps are used to show the Acquisitions that Google had made over the past few years. The graph does look good, and shows the domain of the firm by color coding the ‘route’.

But this graph suffers from a BIG defect : it does not show the ‘time’ factor; as in, we do not know the sequence in which Google acquired the companies. Also, it does not show the amount shelled out by Google in acquiring each of the firms. And I wanted to rectify this by choosing a better medium.

via Origin > Identity > Destiny: ChronoDrop – Visualizing Events.

Science timeline

As Wikileaks continues to move from server to server and DNS entries are shut down for various reasons, mirrors have cropped up around the world.  Check out this neat interactive map that shows the growth from the 5th to the 7th.

Anyone know why there are so many European mirrors?

Wikileaks Mirror Network | vis4.net.

Science interactive, map, timeline

Professor Mike Batty from University College London has a new visualization method called ‘Rank Clocks’ which plot data radially out from the center, showing the change over time.

A rank clock is a device for visualising the changes over time in the ranked order of any set of objects where the ordering is usually from large to small. The size of cities, of firms, the distribution of incomes, and such-like social and economic phenomena display highly ordered distributions. If you rank order these phenomena by size from largest to smallest, the objects follow a power law over much of their size range, or at least follow a log normal distribution which is a power law in the upper tail.

Looks interesting, and the individual plots show the variation over time quite well.

Rank clock of the top 100 high buildings in New York from Michael Batty on Vimeo.

via Digital Urban: Visualising Space-Time Dynamics in Scaling Systems: Rank Clocks.

Science algorithm, timeline, visualization

A surprisingly good graphic from the New York Times today shows what’s happened to the airline industry since deregulation in 78, with each bar representing the total percentage of passengers in the US.  Currently, Southwest seems to have the slight lead with 17%, while classics like American Airlines have dropped down to 12.2%.

The deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 led to a wave of mergers that continues to this day. But even as the legacy carriers have been consolidating and growing, they have been losing market share to low-cost carriers. Two of them, SouthWest and AirTran, have just agreed to merge and carried the most passengers in 2009 combined.

It’s a great representation, the “growing bars” do a great job of not only representing the information, but symbolizing the growth of the companies in a quick overview as well.

via Converging Flight Paths – Graphic – NYTimes.com.

Graphics infographic, nytimes, timeline