This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Recently published, this new edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.

Great book to pick up of your into data visualization or information architecture.

A baker's dozen of inspiring infographics

• Graphic Design
• Illustration
• Infographics

I've been working on a lot of infographics lately. More than one of the projects that I'm working on right now have me knee deep in trying to divine the best way to display copius amounts of information in ways that will not confuse or overwhelm the audience. Given that, it should come as no surprise that I have been scouring the web of late searching for the best infographics out there. But first, for those of you who may be confused as to the exact definitions of information and infographics, the following video should prove useful.

 

Okay, so now without further ado, 13 of my recent favorite infographics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope that was as fun for you to read as it was for me to put together.

The Tool For Notes

 

Tinderbox Weekend Boston

March 13-14, 2010: Tinderbox for Law, Journalism, and Policy. From getting started with Tinderbox to exciting new techniques.

Tinderbox 5

It’s faster. It’s better. And it’s here. Tinderbox 5.0 !

Software event of the year” — S.F. Keydel

The Romero File

A new episodic Tinderbox tutorial explores Tinderbox in a legal investigation. Useful for novices and advanced Tinderbox users alike, with notes about research frontiers. New episodes weekly. Start with Episodes 0, and 1, or catch the latest: Agendas.

 

Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.

VISUAL

Tinderbox maps your notes as you make them. Build relationships by arranging notes, organizing them with shape and color, linking them. Tinderbox lets you record ideas quickly and keep them where you'll find them again when you need them.

SMART

Tinderbox gives you maps, charts, outlines, and more -- and you can have many views open at once.

Tinderbox notes can have prototypes, saving you time and keeping your work organized. A note is just like its prototype -- except when you've said it's different. Change the prototype, and the change is inherited instantly.

ATTENTIVE

Tinderbox agents scan your notes continuously, searching for notes that meet your criteria. Agents can look for tasks that are overdue, or notes you need to complete, or topics that you find especially interesting. Tinderbox can even automatically update notes and RSS feeds from the internet.

SWIFT

Tinderbox is fast. Want to make a note? Just type! Want to edit a note? Just click. Need to search? Tinderbox starts looking for the answer as soon as you start typing, and often finds your answer before you finish.

STANDARD

With Tinderbox, your data is yours. Tinderbox files are XML, and Tinderbox shares notes with HTML, xHTML, XML, RSS, and OPML.

Tinderbox works beautifully with Web standards. The presentation assistant helps build attractive presentations for lectures and for use on the Web. The new Flint weblog assistant helps you design and build sophisticated weblogs using the latest web services.

Everything is stored on your own computer: you aren't dependent on a distant server. Write anytime: on airplanes, in cafs, at home or away. If you share notes on the Web, every aspect of your Web site is up to you. Your site looks the way you want. You can host it anywhere you please.

ACTIVE

Tinderbox is a deep program with an active and friendly user community. The Tinderbox Wiki hosts ongoing discussions and tutorials. Tinderbox weekends -- held throughout the US and Europe -- give Tinderbox users a chance to get together to share ideas and to explore Tinderbox with the Tinderbox developers in person. The Tinderbox Public File Exchange hosts a range of templates, assistants, and samples. You can arrange private Tinderbox training for you and your team.

PERSONAL

Tinderbox is personal. It works the way you want, and adapts gracefully as your needs change. It's small and agile, so you can get started right away, but it's got the power you'll need to handle all your notes.

Your Tinderbox agents work constantly to keep things organized. A rich portfolio of views -- maps, charts, outlines, and more -- keeps you in touch with your information. Work the way you want.

Cool application but spendy. I have used freemind which is open source and does a fine job mind mapping. It always good to know that there is software out there to help organize my mind.

« Sharing Data Visualization Methods Across Disciplines | Main

Visualization at the Crossroads

Category: Boundaries of science
Posted on: September 11, 2009 11:53 AM, by Greg J. Smith

Michelle Borkin is astute in recognizing the manner in which information visualization can collapse the distinction between disciplines. Borkin notes that reading visual representations of star formation and human disease are not unlike exercises as MRI and telescope data are similar in terms of "format, size and noise." Remarkable similarities exist between other fields and visualization is not necessarily tied to the standard operating procedure associated with a specific domain. To the visualization jockey, a network diagram is a network diagram - at least at a schematic level. If the focus is connectivity amongst users of a social web platform or the labyrinthian management structure of a sprawling multinational, the approach could be quite similar. With this in mind I've curated a selection of projects that build bridges between fields. These will be spread out over two posts with the first being recent work and the second highlighting some information visualization classics, so without further ado...

Ben Fry - On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, 2009: An elegant study of the evolution of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species over several editions. Drawing on work by Dr. John van Wyhe, the project codifies edition by edition revisions and additions and displays the changes to the text in an interactive animation. These types of exercises are ubiquitous within web culture (i.e. tracking Wikipedia edits) but rendering a canonical scientific treatise as a "process piece" provides a window into the development of Darwin's theories.

Mitchell Whitelaw - The Visible Archive, 2009: Produced for National Archives of Australia, this research project explores multiple datasets of this institutions holdings to produce maps of the collection. A response to the opacity of the traditional text-based interfaces for accessing archives, The Visible Archive proposes a number of alternative views of the holdings that include tag clouds, histograms and interactive sketches that highlight the relationships between various sub-collections. This methodology draws from statistics and software art and deploys this thinking in an information science context.

 

Marco Quaggiotto - Knowledge Cartography, 2008: This research provides numerous interfaces that foreground pedagogy and academic influence. To an outsider, the connections between scholars, departments and institutions can take years to decipher and this project uses network theory and geographic thinking to visualize these relationships. Stepping away from the rigidity of citation tracking, Knowledge Cartography proposes fluid frameworks for understanding complex relationships. See also City Murmur, an ambitious qualitative urban mapping project in which Quaggiotto is involved.

Jer Thorp - NYTimes: 365/360 - 2008, 2008: Taking advantage of an Article Search API, the image on the left provides a concise map of the organizations and personalities that were mentioned in The New York Times in 2008. This strategy was used to distill a decade and a half of coverage down to a series of yearly gestalts that track trending influencers and (implicitly) reveal political and cultural shifts. Considered in this light the newspaper becomes a tool for the retroactive polling of public interest and the flurry of the news cycle is silenced in favor of a more expansive view of journalism.

Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg - Fleshmap, 2008: A self-described "inquiry into human desire", the Fleshmap employs a number of bottom-up approaches to catalog public perceptions of the body and erogenous zones. Pictured above is a detail of a genre by genre analysis of how the body figures into various music styles as evidenced by lyrics. Is this work cultural studies or statistics? There is most certainly a light-hearted embellishment of the graphic treatments of the various results and the project was obviously intended to be accessible and provocative.