The movie titled "Known Universe" takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Every satellite, moon, planet, star and galaxy is represented to scale and its correct, measured location according to the best scientific research to-date.

Watch the video below.

See also Solar System Scrollable Scale Model, Powers of 10, The Simpsons Powers of 10, Titan Descent Dashboard and Disney Mars Colonization Movies. Via kottke.org.

"A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com" [bits.blogs.nytimes.com] includes two videos (also shown below) that show the traffic to NYTimes.com on June 25, 2009, the day Michael Jackson died. While on video focuses on US-only traffic, the other has a worldwide view. The animated maps also include a subtle visual hint of night time by revealing the city illumination at night.The 24-hour period of web log data is compressed into a little over a minute and a half.

The data used to create these maps come from roughly 15 Web servers. Some of the mobile bursts on the maps are a result of compressing the data.

Thnkx Owen!

The third edition of Visualizar is now finished and the projects developed during the workshop can be visited until the 17th of January in the Medialab Prado in Madrid. The exhibition shows the results of the two weeks of work - from 14 to 27 of November - when participants refined concepts, gathered and parsed necessary data and prototyped the visualizations. After this time, outcomes were quite diverse, varying according to the nature of concepts, the available data and number of contributors. Here is an overview.

The New Political Interfaces [newpoliticalinterfaces.org] aims to visualize the influence of new means of communication in politics. Inspired by the influence of social networking systems in the Obama campaign, the team looked into content generated by official sources and political parties, in contrast to those generated by individuals in online systems. Using data from Twitter, they developed beautiful visualizations to correlate official and personal information regarding the last presidential election in United States. The authors, Cristóbal Castilla, Héctor Sánchez-Pajares and José Hernández, all from Aer studio consider the state of their project as a sketch, and are already working to add further informational layers, and to expand the analysis to other social networking systems.

In What do they have? Alternate Visualizations of Museum Collections , Piotr Adamczyk aggregates and presents data from several art museums around the world. According to Piotr, visualizing public data about global cultural heritage can suggest how a culture sees another and lead to a more open discussion about how the story of public culture is being told. Kultur-o-meter [kulturometer.org/] by Pablo Rey, Mar Núñez and Traficantes de Sueños deals with cultural institutions in a different way. It shows the amount of resources that is allocated to each cultural niche of Madrid. By zooming (click to see full-rez version) into the graphic it is possible to see, for example, that the Medialab Prado corresponds to less than 0,5% of the total cultural budget of Madrid City Hall.

The Piratepie [thepiratepie.org] of Mar Canet, Jaume Nualart, and David Stolarsky, from Future Lab and Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, aims to be a "piracy monitor" that would describe how, where and when Internet piracy occurs. By structuring data of all bittorent files indexed by The Pirate Bay, the team developed several visualizations such as the Pirate Voyager, an analogy to the Baby Name Voyager, and the Area Map, illustrated above, that displays quantitative data according to parameters set on the interface.

The FLUflux project shows correlations among US international flights and global pandemics. The authors Jihyun Kim and Andrés Colubri, authors of the project reckon that the influx of people traveling around the world reflects historical events. In the FLUflux interactive prototype, when a disease is selected, a diagram is presented in which each circle represents a country, while the central one represents the United States. The dataset chosen focused on the United States due to data constraints: it is only only country data makes extensive flight information available online. Connecting lines become shorter when the flux of passengers increases. Selecting a line or circle restricts data to the country that corresponds to the selected element.

In Evolution of Innovation. A visual history of patent registrations during the last decades Leonardo Solaas developed classical visualizations to show the evolution of patent registrations over time. He uses a stacked graph to show amounts of registered patents over time (picture below), a tag cloud to display trends of subjects and a network diagram to show citation patterns.

Hydro Status of Now, designed by Keyvan Minoukadeh and Katrin Caspar, was the most popular project among contributors, counting on 10 volunteers. With all this task force and because the theme can be approached in many ways, the group developed a set of different visualizations, ranging from videos to static graphs and flash prototypes. One such visualization (click to full-rez version) shows the correlation between availability and consumption of water in different countries. Each element represents a country and linking lines represent shared geographical borders. The aim was to raise questions about political relations and to display possibilities of water trading.

Also approaching the theme "water", the River Project [territoriosvivos.org], developed visualizations of the quality of water in rivers of Madrid. Data was gathered by the project itself, and the team even scheduled a visit to a river close Madrid inviting other participants to take part.

The reliability of datasets, a common problem of many information architects, was approached by Jonás Fernández Reviejo, Víctor Rodrigo Gudiel, and Miguel Valero Espada, in Surveillance under control. The team developed a tool to check the validity of datasets based on Benford's Law. With the toll it is possible to apply the law to databases and to visualize the deviation of its data.

Finally, the project In the Air [intheair.es], its web-version having already being featured in this blog, was invited by the Medialab to take part in the workshop, and develop an application for its new digital facade. One of the final data visualizations, displayed above, translated air polluting substances into colors, and displays amounts amounts of such substances through variation of saturation and brightness.

Many of the projects described above are still being improved or extended - also to include stable online versions of final prototypes. The overall wish to improve projects is also a result of the rich atmosphere created by participants, tutors and the Medialab staff during the two weeks of hard work. The mix of people from different backgrounds contributed to question predefined concepts, while new ideas and future work groups emerged from the intense atmosphere of living together through attending the workshop. The exhibition shows the good work developed in the short time frame of the workshop, but further results are still to be seen. You can also read more information at Visualizar's own overview.

This post has been written by Larissa Pschetz, interaction designer living and working in Hamburg, Germany.

Standard Time [standard-time.com] involves about 70 workers who built a large (4x12m), wooden "digital" time display. Which they then updated in "real time". All of this resulted in a unique urban screen that involved about 1,611 tedious changes within 24 hour period.

"The spectator looking at Standard Time does not only see the time, but also the people constructing it. People who, with a stoic sense of duty, are wasting time on an apparently useless activity that fulfills only one function: to display time."

The concept reminds me of a combination of Digital Ceiling Clock with the real-time updates from the RE:ID project. Via Thijsma.

Watch a documentary video below.

We are considering to start a regular guest post series focused on reviewing information visualization tools and software. After all, there are plenty of reviews available online, from testing software, electronic gadgets and books, to the literal unpacking of newly acquired goods, but almost none that deal with the development of data visualizations.

First of all, we would like to know whether there is interest in such a regular review feature, and whether there are more people around the community that want to help us with this initiative.

Other questions include: Should a popular blog like infosthetics deal with reviewing? What would you like to see reviewed? Are there specific tools or software you are already interested in to be tested? How should a typical data visualization review look like? What are the criteria? How can we compare tools with each other? What should be the benchmarks? What comparable or example datasets should we use?

Please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

Kim Rees is a partner at Periscopic, an interactive design firm specializing in data visualization and information presentation.

PlayaroundNYC [playaroundnyc.com] is an interesting example of where social visualization meets captology. The website was specifically created to help New Yorkers explore how well their neighborhoods are supported by playgrounds and to investigate how this support is tempered by nearby conditions. The aim is that with better understanding, New Yorkers will be in a better position to act to both improve the availability and quality of neighborhood playgrounds.

The neighborhood playground support map is the result of combining several different types of data sets. First, each playground was assigned a quality rating. Currently quality is mainly determined by nearness to major and minor truck routes. A grid of points were then sampled on the map, by determining the nearest playgrounds, walking distance to these playgrounds, and the quality of these playgrounds. These factors are combined to assign each point an overall rating which estimates how well that area is supported by playgrounds. Lastly, the various support ratings are interpolated to generate the heatmap visual effect.

Canvi and Temps (click both links!) [culturesdelcanvi.com] are two impressive network browsing spaces by the datavis group Bestiario. These historical (with citations since 1927) and transversal (with more than 30 categories of fields of knowledge) visualizations offer access to the collection of approaches, strategies and tactics, research methods and interests known as "complexity science". The project is based on various data sets including articles, pages, persons and links that relate with the topic of complexity in science.

"Temps" highlights the interest in representing changes associated with complexity science through time (starting from 1927, which is the chronological reference in the field). Temps allows to see changes on the usage intensity of the tags through time, and includes an interactive time slider bar and mouse hovering actions to access more detailed information.

"Canvi" is an interface that enables browsing a network with a local vision of a node's surroundings while allowing moving through the network through their relation. Canvi combines different techniques (so-called "geometric paradigms") subtly alternating between nodes and their relation. This means that the visual representation of the network is in constant movement (a breathing sort of movement), this way offering a broader perception of the local network.

More information at Bestiario Blog.

On the occasion of the recent fifth birthday of this blog, we thought a bit about the archival nature of the whole enterprise. With (almost) daily updates about fresh projects from visualization and information aesthetics, about 1950 different projects have been described and documented up to now. So here [moritz.stefaner.eu] is a first step towards making this growing archive more accessible: a custom adaptation of the elastic lists principle for the 1950 posts of infosthetics.com.

Here is how it works: The little tiles on the left represent the individual posts, with color stripes representing their categories. You can find a color legend in the category filter on the right. In addition, you will find filters for the number of comments, year and author. Clicking one of the filter entries will display only matching posts, and also update the number of items for each filter accordingly. If you click a post, you can see its details on the bottom, and visit it by clicking the preview. In addition, the filter values that belong to this post are marked with a grey background.

The little bar charts in each filter show you the relative number of posts in the current filter context (red bar) compared to the overall percentage (grey bar) - so, in the example above, you can see that for the selected category infographic the number of comments is slightly higher than usual and the posts seem to be more recent overall.

There is certainly room for improvement (keyword search, represent links between projects...), but we thought it would be good to share it anyways - so try it out and let us know what you think! Do you think this is worth pursuing, and which other browsing options/modes could be interesting to you?

(Note by infosthetics: Best birthday present ever! Thnkx Moritz!)

5 years ago to this day, the very first post [web.archive.org] appeared on infosthetics.com. It was a short description of how the name of this blog came to be. This was then followed by an entry detailing some sort of funky Bluetooth Christmas tree, but quickly turned into more relevant posts highlighting still timeless visualization pieces like Ecotonoha, Ten by Ten and the still impressive Degree Confluence Project. Much has happened since then. Or to be more precise, about 1950 published entries, almost each linking to a unique project, which in turn generated about 4309 (hopefully non-spam) comments.

What started out as a simple, small, personal project motivated out of pure frustration ("Why can I not find a webpage with beautifully designed visualizations?") seemed to have sparked the interest of more than 37,000 daily feed subscribers today. It would actually be nice to track down the first subscribers, if I would only know how. While back then infosthetics was the 'only' weblog focusing on the topic of data visualization, there now exist a wide range of specialized viz- and infographic blogs, and any self-respecting popular design blog now features some sort 'infographic best-of' list. The fact at least 4 beautiful books have been published around the theme of aesthetic data visualization makes it all the better. Hopefully, some day, this all might culminate into a sparkling, creative and self-directed community, as I feel many of the interesting visualization works are still shown, discussed and appreciated in disparate fields without much cross-disciplinary discourse.

The reason why this site is still up and running is truly because of your continuing interest, for which I wish to thank you deeply, my faithful reader. Although I often need to juggle the blog between my professional and family life, it does actually help this blog is exactly what I "want" it to be (well, in terms of content that is, as I try to ignore the many website bugs and missing features...). Therefore, I feel quite amazed each single day that other people find the things I personally feel very passioned about worthwhile to read. I also want to thank the site's sponsors (i.e. FusionCharts, Loop11, Morae and InstantAtlas), most of which have featured here for many, many months, and those readers who have ordered stuff through clicking the commercial links or the information aesthetics shop, for making this endeavor somehow financially viable.

As a typical "link"-blog, I have no way to experience the true "effect" of my own posts. I can only imagine how a visualization I did post suddenly gets thousands of hits, sometimes manages to appear on Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon, or gets a press request, simply through the mentioning on this blog. If I occasionally hear about this, it makes me very glad.

Sometimes, blogs like Engadget make me jealous, in how they are provided with important scoops, products to review, or relevant press releases well ahead of time. While I do get many reader suggestions, of which most are very useful, I still need to conduct an almost daily personal hunt for that "perfect" post that will eclipse all others. For instance, the fact I had to discover the somehow quite relevant book "Data Flow" through pure coincidence well after it was released, still makes me wonder, sometimes. I also do often question how I could increase the engagement and commenting on this blog.

For those who are still reading this self-indulgent post, there might be a reward. To celebrate this occasion, I will be giving three books away: The Visual Miscellaneum, We Feel Fine and Data Flow. To participate, simply add a comment below, describing why your read information aesthetics, or how it has changed some aspect of your life, or how it could become a better blog. On Monday 14th December, I will choose the 3 most original comments and let the winners choose what book they want.

Good luck!

A few days ago, the UK's Met Office (short for Meteorological Office) released a large data subset containing a record of global temperatures. The subset is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC assessment reports and numerous scientific studies. The data show monthly average temperature values for over 1,500 land stations.

Both Manuel Lima (of Visual Complexity) and Jer Thorp (of blprnt.com) have called for the "data community" to step in and use this opportunity to create meaningful data representations. Accordingly, an open online forum titled "#ClimateData", has been created where data visualization enthusiasts are invited to participate in a constructive dialogue towards this goal.

In the meantime, some early visualization results have already trickled in.

- Information is Beautiful (of the book The Visual Miscellaneum) has developed a very detailed infographic depicting the different arguments in the ongoing debate between the Global Warming Sceptics versus the Scientific Consensus.

- Flink Labs mapped the temperature readings of more than 200 years on an animated 3D globe.

- Lastly, blprnt has created 12 monthly data representations, visualizing all 1,670,354 released Met Office Climate records.

Is this a worthwhile initiative? Are there more visualizations around? Are you planning to make one? Let us know in the comments below!