Sync/Lost [3bits.net] is a multi-user data visualization installation that allows users to become immersed in the history of electronic music. Starting from a complex timeline, user interactivity allows rhythms and sub-rhythms to merge into new sounds. The user interaction is accomplished with wiimote controls, wireless handheld pointers which are relatively easy to use and learn. The audible feedback is provided via wireless headphones.

The project's objective is to create an interface where people can explore all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through both visual and audible feedback. The interaction with the resulting network graph leads to "a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information".

Via Visual Complexity.

As a seemingly out-of-the-box creative solution to an essay assignment, this enthusiastic student successfully combined 2 of her favorite things: "being a nerd" and "dancing". In practice, she takes on the challenge to "dance" several data visualization techniques, including a line graph, scatter plot, box and whisker plot, pie graph, bar graph, sin and cos graph and csc graph. Luckily she put it on YouTube for all to see...

Watch the movie below.

If you appreciate the combination of dancing with infographics, be sure not to miss Protein Synthesis People Chains. You can also check out Typographic Reinterpretation of Cunningham's Dancing Hands.

Via Krees.

UPDATE: Some background to this video at NYTimes, Boston Globe and ABC (found at Flowing Data).

Tweet-o-Meter [casa.ucl.ac.uk] is an ongoing research project at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, and attempts to "further the understanding of the social and temporal dynamics of cities within the Twitter demographic".

In practice, this means that an online dashboard-like interface compares the number of tweets (measured in Tweets per Minute or TPM) originating from different cities around the world. Potential questions that could be answered this way include: "Is New York the city that never sleeps? Do Londoners send more Tweets than New Yorkians'? Is Oslo a bigger Tweeter than Munich?", and so on.

However, the more original aspect of this project seems to consist of its attempt to offer this information within the public, urban space. The movie below shows such a small prototype installation of an "analog" dashboard of the same data.

More information is available here.

Charting the Beatles [mikemake.com] is a still ongoing project to analyze the music of the Beatles through the use of infographics. The Flickr group with the same name contains a plethora of diagrams and charts taken from secondary sources, including but not limited to, sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.

Michael Deal, the initiator of this project, might have designed the most impressive graphs of them all. One includes the depiction of authorship and collaboration, which naturally traces the songwriting contributions within the band. Another diagram analyzes the self-references occurring in the song lyrics, noting the exact referencing lyrics and at what point in each song they can be found. The circular "Working Schedule" focuses on revealing similarities in their main activities from year to year.

The ultimate goal is to start a larger and open collaborative project currently to be published on chartingthebeatles.com.

luscious [hint.fm] is an attempt to distill the visions of fashion designers and photographers, those who compose rousing images of light and color that fill the pages of glossy magazines, into poetic abstract compositions.

To create the images in luscious, information designers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas began with a series of magazine advertisements for luxury brands. They then used a custom algorithm designed to extract "peak" colors from these picture. A random arrangement of concentric circles fills the plane, representing the essential colors of each region. The resulting image hides context and representation and lets the viewer concentrate on pure color.

More information is also available on their project page.

Everyone Ever in the World [theluxuryofprotest.com] is a poster depicting the number of people to have lived versus been killed in wars, massacres and genocide during the recorded history of humankind. The resulting visualization, printed in transparent ink, uses existing paper area and paper loss (die cut circle) to represent the concepts of life and death respectively. The sequence of dots to the top left of the graph shows the dramatic increase in the number of conflicts over the past 5 millennia (left to right : 3000 BCE to 2000 CE) with the most recent 1000 years being the most violent. The large dot below the graph represents the 1000 years to come : a predicted startling increase in human conflict.

The total number of people to have lived was estimated through exponential regression calculations based on historical census data and known biological birth rates. This results in approximately 77.6 billion human beings to have ever lived during the recorded history of humankind. The total people killed in conflicts was collated from a number of historical source books and was summed for all conflicts - approximately 969 million people killed, or ~1.25% of all the people to have ever lived. The timescale encompasses 3200 BCE to 2009 CE - a period of over 5 millennia, and 1100+ conflicts of recorded human history.

The poster is for sale at Counter Objects.

via unterart.wordpress.com

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In an apparent trend set by some of their latest work for the US online media, like the MTV Award Twitter Tracker, data visualization firm Stamen Design recently released an interactive treemap [nbcolympics.com] showing the tweets that deal with the current Winter Olympics in real-time.

A subtle (almost invisible?) sparkline on the top shows some stats and the relative amount of tweets over time. The larger the rectangle, the more tweets have appeared about that topic. Individual rectangles can be selected for more detailed tweets about that specific topic. More information is available on the Stamen blog.

As an avid infosthetics subscriber, you definitely should be the proud owner of the book "Data Flow". Why? Well, the book is (sometimes uncomfortably...) closely related to most of the content that is featured here on this website. In addition, it also adds some thick, glossy paper and an impressive high-definition image resolution that makes any visualization enthusiast drool.

Based on the success of the first book, the publisher will very soon be releasing the book's successor, aptly titled "Data Flow 2". In fact, according to the latest information, the official release is expected any day now.

You might wonder: How does the book look like inside? What is the difference between the two books? Would Tufte like it? And how did the editors decide which project to accept, and which one not?

If you really want to know these things and more, you can check out a sneak preview of the book's content, and read an interview with Sven Ehmann, one of the 4 editors, here after the break.