visual data

We’re deep in the midst of a data viz heyday. Infographics are ubiquitous, presenting facts and data sets in straightforward ways that are, by design, easy to understand.

Willem Besselink takes a different approach by translating directed sets of information into physical forms. What’s not explicit, however, are the complex stats that inspire each work.

Each new installation is dictated by its own unique guidelines and rules, which themselves are based on a number of dependent variables, including site-specifics, materials, color scheme, and budget. “Setting these up and following them all through the project allows--or forces--me to do what needs to be done,” he says, in part following the lead of “hero” Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art.

My classmates and I are in the Design for Social Innovation program because we identified problems in our communities, companies, or cultures and are keen to figure them out. But before talking about any solution or outcome, one must first frame the problem—by thoughtfully examining the system it’s part of to understand where and how to get involved.

When I wrote that Radar was investigating data journalism and asked for your favorite examples of good work, we heard back from around the world.

I received emails from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Canada and Italy that featured data visualization, explored the role of data in government accountability, and shared how open data can revolutionize environmental reporting...

It was instructive to learn more about the work of two large media organizations, the Los Angeles Times and Canada’s Global News, which have been building their capacity to practice data journalism. The other international perspectives in my inbox and tweet stream, however, were a reminder that big-city newsrooms that can afford teams of programmers and designers aren’t the only players here.acts of data journalism by small teams or individuals aren’t just plausible, they’re happening — from Italy to Brazil to Africa.

That doesn’t mean that the news application teams at NPR, The Guardian, ProPublica or the New York Times aren’t setting the pace for data journalism when it comes to cutting edge work — far from it — but the tools and techniques to make something worthwhile are being democratized.

That’s possible in no small part because of the trend toward open source tools and social coding I’m seeing online, from Open Street Map to more open elections...

These data visualizations, caricatures, and images capture the internet in all it's wiry glory.

Though we use it every day in countless ways, the Internet remains mostly faceless to us. Like a faint memory, we feel we know it intimately but have no sense of its size, its scale, or its design.

To give form to what we too prevalently consider a formless entity, we've rounded up some impressive attempts at capturing its likeness--from data visualization to caricature--to better answer the question: What is the Internet, anyway?

Big Data has become an essential part of the world of business, providing billions of data points from targeted audiences globally.

Data points are comprised of the market intelligence that have been gathered into consumer behavior, purchasing patterns and brand affinity across numerous verticals from auto, tech, gaming, health and beauty, entertainment, and travel, among others.

The customer intelligence derived from actionable data helps identify markets and customers, measure brand loyalty and pinpoint new trends; ultimately, helping companies understand what people think.

Big data doesn’t come from one source, but from a multitude of sources – surveys, focus groups, mobile feedback, purchase history and customer service to name a few...

Mankind loves making maps, and the world wide web, densely interconnected and phenomenally complex, always makes for a nice visual.

Typically these take the form of neon blobs floating against black backgrounds, like frames captured from old Winamp plug-ins, and while they’re always nice to look at, they don’t always do much in the way of helping us understand the massive global network we traverse every day. This latest effort, however, is a little different. Called simply Map of the Internet, it’s as informative as it is beautiful.

The map, which takes the form of a free app for Android and iOS, features 22,961 of the Internet’s biggest nodes--not individual websites, but the ISPs, universities, and other places that host them--joined by some 50,000 discrete connections. The app gives you two ways of surveying it all: geographically, on a globe, or by size, which rearranges the nodes into a loose column of points. Both views are interactive; instead of showing the Internet as a static neon blob, the app lets you explore the neon blob in the round, with all the familiar multitouch gestures. It may not look like the Google Maps app, but it instantly feels like it, which makes exploring the underbelly of the web all the easier...

Mapping the global flow of scientific talent by way of Mondrian and Kandinsky.

After their wonderful visual timeline of the future based on famous fiction and visual history of the Nobel Prize, Italian information visualization designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat are back with another exclusive English version of a piece originally designed for La Lettura, the Sunday literary supplement of an Italian newspaper— this time exploring the phenomenon of global “brain drain” in science, with an eye towards understanding the reasons why researchers might choose to leave their countries of origin and pursue careers elsewhere.

No matter what happens, there will always be a demand for data visualization tools. Data on its own can be pretty boring and brightening it up with images and other visual tools, it can make normally inaccessible information much easier to digest. (Editor’s Note: It’s also great for information reading literacy, and the new Common Core demand for multimedia “texts.”)

There are a number of fantastic tools out there that will present your data in an accessible manner. All of the tools listed below are free and chances are you’ve used one or two of the tools mentioned before.

A visual history of human sensemaking, from cave paintings to the world wide web.

Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been using visual depictions to map the earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even decorate abstract concepts like consciousness and love.

100 Diagrams That Changed the World by investigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christianson chronicles the history of our evolving understanding of the world through humanity’s most groundbreaking sketches, illustrations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses Harris’s color wheel to Tim Berners-Lee’s flowchart for a “mesh” information management system, the original blueprint for the world wide web.

But most noteworthy of all is the way in which these diagrams bespeak an essential part of culture — the awareness that everything builds on what came before, that creativity is combinational, and that the most radical innovations harness the cross-pollination of disciplines.