A Wealth Of (Visual) Information

Data visualization has moved out of the labs to Main Street.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the three minutes and nine seconds of Scott Manley's YouTube video, each asteroid discovery over the past 30 years emerges as a bright shock of color on a mostly black background, a map of the earth's circulation in our solar system. Over the first decade (or minute and a half of the video) relatively little happens; a tiny blue earth revolves around a larger yellow sun every six seconds, white asteroids stipple the "universe" behind it. By two-and-a-half minutes, the entire background is swathed in green and yellow, red and white--it's like a Venn diagram on steroids.

It's not just a pretty picture, either. Each asteroid is plotted using actual documented discovery dates taken from the Minor Planet Center and the Lowell Observatory, major astronomy centers that host large sets of publicly available data. Manley's foray into the world of data visualization is one of many other projects cropping up on the Web that bring innovative approaches to the depiction of normally tabular data sets, giving an aesthetic appeal to an otherwise unattractive body of information.

Rodenbeck and the team at Stamen used the wealth of information provided by DataSF.org (a site hosted by the city and county of San Francisco), Craigslist.org and other public resources to create an online interactive data map of one of the Bay Area's more interesting and "colorful" districts, the Tenderloin. The maps highlight everything from how many trees populate the Tenderloin (not very many) to how many narcotics arrests occur (quite a bit more than there are trees). Josette Melchor, executive director at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, says the "Tenderloin Dynamic" project uses all of this freely available information to raise "social consciousness through digital culture."

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