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US Trade Deficit is an interactive graph that depicts the U.S. annual trade surplus/deficit information for each of the top 10 countries for each category (surplus/deficit). The countries that are in surplus (adding cash to the US economy) are along the top, while the countries along the bottom show the corresponding trade deficits (that are taking cash out of the US economy).

The dataset was gathered from census.gov and comprises statistics from January 1998 until October 2008. More information can be found at the author’s personal blog.

As a Belgian, it is curious to see Belgium, as the only West European country, frequently pop up in the list of surplus cash flows, between relatively dissimilar countries like Panama, Jamaica, Chile, Qatar, Honduras, Bahamas, and others. I am not sure what Belgians continuously are buying from the U.S., but it seems to be worth a lot.

TimeSpace is an interactive map that allows users to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. One can discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered, use the slider timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, or customize news searches to a particular day or specific hour.

The project Related Pages consists of small, minimal force-directed network visualization located in the sidebar of a wiki webpage. The graph shows the “proximity” of the content on visited webpage in the context of a whole website. The visualization aims at offering the user an alternative possibility to navigate across the wiki from the School of the Arts in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany.

Contrary to the conventional hierarchical way to navigate online (i.e. following an hierarchical “menu”), the focus of this kind of navigation is on the “proximity” (relevance?) of the content that is being displayed. The proximity of a page is calculated as followed: it must have at least 1 tag in common with the current page, being linked to the current page, being linked with outgoing links on the current page, or being at a level above in the breadcrumb-navigation.

The red dot represents the actual webpage. The gray tones denote the time since the last update of the webpage. The distance between the nodes conveys the distance of the content.

A commercially available wallpaper pattern based on the news headlines from the New York Times. The headlines are organized chronologically and color-coded as subject matter is mapped unto a rainbow legend. Subsequently, global, national, and local events generate a continuous stream of news from which color patterns emerge.

ext2image is one of those “data art” works that balances on the line of total uselessness and visual fascination. While there is no immediate purpose, one still spends minutes playing around with it. It is an online tool which allows the user to transform text of any sort into a “visualization” of that very content. The results are deterministic, in that they are consistent to the given input, but extremely dynamic through its variance. Notably, “the application of these images is a complete unknown.” Well, I know a use: as a game to try to figure out how what the heck is the algorithm that turns the characters into a visual representation.

Glocal (short for global + local) is an “immense, collaborative and multifaceted” digital art project that examines the making, sharing and exhibiting of digital images. Thousands of individuals, including artists, non-artists and youth, are invited to participate to collaborate in the making of what promises to be Canada’s largest “contributive” digital artwork.

Synoptic is a 3D “interactive infographic” based on the chronological sequence of back-dated meteorological data from Augsburg (Germany). Users can select a data attribute to explore (e.g. temperature, luminosity, humidity, air pressure, precipitation), alter timespans, and detect outliers, trends or patterns over time on a three-dimensional line graph landscape.

Josef Müller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher, mostly recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography, notably Helvetica. His shapes and colours have inspired many graphic designers in the 21st century, and made him one of the main precursors of the International Typographic Style, also known as Swiss Style.
This visualization is the result of a personal web research about Josef Müller-Brockmann and the international typographical style. It contains 3 key elements: (1) the research of information on the web, (2) chronological information on Josef Muller-Brockmann’s life and links to the last part, and finally the last part (3) is composed of a critical article based on information found online. The project is in french.

The project contains 4 beautiful interactive data visualizations that explore the emerging patterns in scientific citation networks.

“Citation Patterns” provides an overview of the whole citation network in a circular graph. The colors represent the 4 main groups of journals, which are further subdivided into fields in the outer ring. Line size and opacity represents connection strength

“Change over Time” is a combination of a Sankey Diagram and a stacked bar graph. It shows the changes in the “Eigenfactor Score” and clustering over time. Journals are grouped vertically according to their cluster structure. Bars belonging to the same journal are connected.

The “Clustering” graph displays a hierarchical clustering of journals in the form of a treemap …with a twist: rectangles can be clicked to reveal directional black arrow that indicate the outgoing versus incoming citation flow. The size of a journal marker corresponds to its “Eigenfactor Score”.

Finally, the “Map” shows an interactive network graph clustering those which frequently cite each other, closer together. The node sizes represent the relative amount of citation flow.

Data visualization project for Google. The concept revolved around the idea of aggregating and visualizing the scale and pace of activity as well as the influence of social media over that data. The end result of this effort would harness the power of Google Analytics and other data from varied sources and display them in a super flexible interface that would be beautiful in it’s own right.

Instrument developed an application to aggregate the data from sources all over the Internet. The result was a compelling way to show not only how many visits or downloads a web page might generate, but the effect that the media, bloggers and individuals have over the pace and scale of that activity.

TreeViz is an amazingly small and elegant application (working on all OS platforms) that is able to visualize large data structures organized in a tree by 7(!) different interactive data visualization techniques: Hyperbolic Tree, Circular Treemap, Rectangular Treemap, Sunburst Tree, Icicle Tree, Sunray Tree and Iceray Tree. The project currently consists of a file browser demonstration, which visually represent your computer system’s file structure.

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Nuke it!

FeedVis is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog posts of interest.

Tags are ordered by frequency and frequency change. Frequency denotes how many times a word is used per 1000 words. Frequency change measures the difference in frequency as a percentage: greener words are unusually popular; redder words are the opposite.

The next geographical mapping startup, SpatialKey is marketed as a “next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System”. It is specifically designed to help organizations quickly assess location-based information to allow for decision making processes and reporting requirements. There are several online demos available, ranging from “Wal-Mart store openings (1962 - 2005)” to “San Antonio prostitution arrests (January, 2006 - July, 2007)”

In practice, users can view and overlay all sorts of “geo-temporal data” (data with recorded location and time information) and generate time slices of the data, much like a moving weather map. The current visualization templates include three different map rendering techniques: heat map, heat grid and graduated circles.