Where do you think the US imports the most oil from? Most of us would probably say somewhere in the Middle East, but Jon Udell does some number crunching and shows that misconception is false. Canada supplies us with the most oil (according to the US Department of Energy).

This realization however, isn't the post's punchline. It's how easy it was for Jon to figure this stuff out. With some help from Dabble DB (an app that lets you easily use a database without too much technical fuss), Jon was able to parse the data and map it by region with a few swift clicks.

We’re really close to the point where non-specialists will be able to find data online, ask questions of it, produce answers that bear on public policy issues, and share those answers online for review and discussion. A few more turns of the crank, and we’ll be there. And not a moment too soon.

We're gettin' there.

[Thanks, Tim]

See my guest post on Information Aesthetics.  Iceland is out of orbit!

A Junk Charts reader tipped us about this chart that appeared on the front page of one of their newspapers. It announced: "Iceland banks are in a universe of hurt".

As we all know, Iceland is bankrupt, and all its banks are spinning out of orbit. But is this outer-space concept successful in portraying the story? We think not.

Read the detailed critique below.

Can a picture of a nude person improve your decision-making processes? (Please don’t say “yeaaaaah”.) Probably not, but if you need a good attention grabber a picture of a naked body is your best bet. Make sure you’ll add one to your next sales report.

Because, if you are using those glossy 3D pie charts from Crystal Xcelsius (or Dundas, or…), you are applying the same principle, safe-for-work version. Your underlying message to your audience is “you are so dumb that you don’t even understand a simple chart with a clear message. I have to use charts that obfuscate the message, but they grab your attention and that’s all that matters. Let me take my shirt off too.”

I’m a business analyst I usually try to create charts that can support the decision-making process. I am not a graphic designer, trying to illustrate a story and get reader’s attention.

When you are in a corporate environment you can enjoy the attention of your audience (the organization is paying for it…). Also, information is shared among people with similar professional profile that at least know what the basic concepts are.

On the contrary, in a magazine, your readers don’t know or may not care about your subject. How do you grab their attention? Your best option is to add a photo of a naked male/female. Can you justifiably use it to illustrate the story? Do it. You don’t? OK, try other attention-grabber devices, like a nice, glossy pie chart (not as satisfying, though).

These are different needs, but we, the so called “visualization experts” often fail to aknowledge that.

Eye-Catching Charts vs. Decision-Support Charts

Eye-catching charts are used to get the reader’s attention by providing some sort for light entertainment. Their primary focus is on the format. They use many colours and and large textured surfaces. Because of that, their data density is low and context is almost absent. A 3D pie chart is the typical eye-catching chart.

Decision-support charts  focus on the data and should be “invisible” (the audience sees the patterns, not the chart). There are no textured surfaces and colors are used to highlight specific details. The display real estate can be filed with context data, maximizing data density. The typical decision-support chart is, obviously, the scatterplot.

Charts for Analysis and Charts for Communication - Not Anymore?

This is the traditional split. After the analysis stage, the analyst should prepare his/her findings for the communication stage. But vendors like Microsoft and Business Objects have been short-circuiting this process, selling the idea that all you need is form, not content, and whatever stage you are in, you must have a nicely textured 3D chart.

These charts are sold as “professional-looking” and let’s accept that for a moment. They are professional-looking from a graphic designer perspective, but they are completely useless in a corporate environement where you have masssive amounts of data to deal with. I’m sorry to say, but the more textured charts you have the dumber you look.

Pin-Up Charts Don’t Belong Here

I don’t really care about pin-up charts (charts that the media pin up on their pages…).  Sometimes they are amusing (not sexy, unfortunately) but they just don’t belong in a corporate environment. If you need attention, make better use of your data to find its inner beauty or use a photo of a proper pin-up.

Post from: Jorge Camoes' Charts

According to the authors, each city's various subway structures and railway systems should reflect somehow the character of that city. In an effort to infuse the city's identity into its subway map, while also trying to simplify and beautify the original diagram, Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol produced a series of original maps for three city subway systems - the Seoul Railway, Tokyo Railway and Osaka Railway. More cities are in the design phase and others are being planned.

The first image depicts Tokyo's intricate network of subway, lightrail and monorail, with more than 1500 stations covering the metropolitan area. Placed in the city center is the Imperial Palace, the residence of the current Ten-no (Japanese Emperor). Subway lines circumvent the expansive ground claimed by the Imperial Palace. This characteristic is visualized in this map by the concentric circles spreading out to the entire city, with the center in the Imperial Palace ground. This strong representation of circles is reminiscent of the national flag of Japan and the Japanese identity expressed in the flag.

The second represents Seoul's network. The city boasts 600 years of history as the capital of the South Korea and its crossed by a river of great magnitude, which has become one of its most important symbols, the Han Gang. The depiction of Han River in this map mimics the curvature in the middle of the Tae-Geuk mark of the national flag of Korea. The overall circular shape of the map was also inspired by the Tae-Geuk mark. The brighter area in the center of the map shows the territory of Han Yang, the old capital of Cho-Sun Dynasty. This was the old Seoul marked by the Four Gates, and the growth of the city becomes clear when compared to the modern metropolitan sprawl.

The Tax Map is a graph of the United States Tax Code, represented as a network. In the network each node represents a section of the tax code, while each edge represents a reference from one section to another. As the author explains, the project was born by a desire to better understand how the complexity of this mass of rules and exceptions would bear out if one were to "look at the mere structure of the tax code, stripped naked of its rules and semantics."

Each colored circle represents a section of the tax code. Size is determined by how many times that section of the tax code is referenced by other sections of the tax code; while color is determined by the ratio of references to a particular statute, by references made by the statute itself. This ratio is then calculated against a color range from blue to red to determine the final color. Finally, each line represents a reference from one statute to another. The color of the line is determined by whether the reference remains within a single chapter, or goes to a statute in another chapter. White lines are for intra-chapter, while colored ones are for inter-chapter. Each chapter is given its own color for outgoing references.

The Tax Map was created by using the Perl and Java programming languages. Perl was used to scrape the online tax code for the relevant data. Java was used to render the images, using JUNG.

The Complexcity project explores major cities around the world focussing on how their urban sprawls have evolved over time. Using the patterns formed by roads in each city, Korean born designer Lee Jang Sub creates complex graphic configurations, combining the idea of natural and man made systems. In the process he finds a concealed aesthetic within the convoluted pattern of urban networks. He started with his hometown Seoul, and has already completed Paris, Rome, and Moscow. The first image illustrates the intricate urban pattern of Moscow, while the second is representative of Paris.

He has also produced a range of wall decorations using the same idea for spanish company Granada Design.

These work-in-progress maps are part of a study produced in the spring of 2008 for economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, law professor at the French engineering school UTC. They represent the linked terms of vocabulary used on the Web to talk about the intellectual property rights in French. The datasets came from the search engine Exalead SA.

Each node is a term and each edge exists when two terms or expressions are co-cited on a sufficient number of web pages, over more than 120,000 pages. 1283 expressions and 4984 co-citing links have been selected, assuming a representative approach against an exhaustive one. The first image is a detail of the general map where semantic clusters are represented with different color-nodes. The second image is a test to display the imprint of two meta-clusters : the vocabulary of intellectual property rights (in red) versus the one of industrial property rights (in blue).

With thousands of donors for McCain and Obama, the authors wanted to analyze the types of people donating by examining the top 250 job titles for each candidate and trying to determine how much influence they have on the overall donations viewed in their previous visualization.

Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, they turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information the authors may try to explore next (i.e. occupation, zip code, employer).

The first image represents all donations made to Obama, and the second to McCain. The job titles (on the left side of the arc), start from the most common (Retired for both) on the left to the least common (of the top 250 titles) on the right. The right side of the arc is segmented into dollar brackets. The left bracket are amounts less than $100, the second is $100 to $500, the third is $500 to $1000 and the last (the largest) is over $1000. Also, the size of the right side ($ amount) segments are sized according to the total percentage of donation amount from the donors listed.

The most obvious result is that the most common donors for both candidates donated in the top-most $ amount bracket. However, for McCain, the top-most doners dominated his higher dollar brackets while the lower two are very mixed. In Obama's chart, we see a more dominant role of the less common doners in the $100 > $500 bracket. Also, Obama's lower (< $100) bracket is larger than McCain's.

The Emergence Project is a software art installation exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center's digital facade gallery from October 11 until December 31, 2008. The piece investigates how complex patterns arise out of a series of simple interactions, without apparent direction or plan. Rising from the actual as-it's-happening discourse emanating out of the Chicago Humanities Festival, the presentations, performances, and panel discussions are captured, analyzed, and processed into visualizations that dynamically evolve from minute to minute. The generative artwork uses simple morphological rules to animate word clusters, based on linguistic proximity, similarity, and difference.

In the work, hundreds of organic digital creatures embody contributions from panelists and the audience, captured by natural language processing software and the World Wide Web. The digital creatures, or idea clusters, continuously interact with each other, evaluating qualitative proximity in regards to their meaning and frequency. Thousands of local interactions between the creatures, as well as autonomous creation of new creatures, eventually generate patterns, that represent 'big ideas' emerging from the discussions throughout the festival. The piece continues to evolve over time, reflecting the evolution process in form of graphical patterns, statistics and maps.

Emergence has become one of the liveliest areas of research in philosophy and science. Examples of apparent emergent phenomena range from colonies of ants to the popularity of a particular hairstyle, and life itself. The Emergence Project interrogates the very concept of Emergence by reflexively adopting emergent behavior simulations to contemporary discourse on Emergence.

2007 was a record year in spam. Worldwide, more than 346 trillion spam emails were sent, which represent about 98% of all e-mail traffic. In an effort to understand who is behind the spam and why it's so difficult to effectively combat the phenomenon, Daniel Burger, as part of his thesis in FH Dusseldorf, produced a striking book (164 pages) with amazing information design posters depicting different aspects of one year's spam in 2007.

The annual report is based on the results of intensive searches and summarizes a variety of sources. From literature and the Internet, data, facts and information about spam and spammers were collected for this work. As spammers rarely voluntarily provide information on their illegal operations to disclose, Burger had to look at a variety of publications, organizations, government agencies, market researchers, scientists and software companies, in order to get the information he needed.

This simple, yet effective application built in ActionScript 3.0, works as a test environment for the SoundCloud API. SoundCloud is a great music sharing service, allowing artists, record labels & other music professionals to easily receive, send and distribute music.

RadioCloud allows the browsing of SoundCloud users, and respective connections, and the streaming of their most popular track.

This visualization by Ben Fry depicts all of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. Alaska and Hawaii were initially left out for simplicity's sake, but then Ben Fry felt guilty because of the sad emails he received. However, he made the final decision of leaving them out permanently because the two states didn't "work", since there aren't enough roads to outline their shape.

The first image depicts all 48 states while the second shows a detail view into Kansas City, where the white blocks seem to be rural routes and unnamed roads.

Knowledge Cartography is part of a PhD research on the visual representation of knowledge. The aim of the research is to extend the cartographic metaphor beyond visual analogy, and to expose it as a narrative model and tool to intervene in complex, heterogeneous, dynamic realities, just like those of human geography.

The map is thus not only a passive representation of reality but a tool for the production of meaning. Just like a text, the map makes selections on reality, distorts events, classifies and clarifies the world in order to selections better tell a particular aspect of a territory, an event, a space.

The images shown here are screenshots taken from ATLAS, the application that's being developed to explore the possibilities of the application of a cartographic metaphor to the realms of knowledge. The concept of ATLAS in this context doesn't only depict a list of maps, but rather a system of representations of space, a communication device aimed at representing complex contexts through the use of many partial overlapping narrations: a network of maps, diagrams, texts and peritexts, combined together to describe the space of research in its multifaceted aspects.

Developed for the Foresight Tackling Obesities project, this causal loop map was designed to provide systemic insight into the multiplicity of factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Behind the simple result of people becoming heavier, lies a complex web of often reinforcing causal factors that range from individual psychology and physiology to the culture and economics of food production, food consumption, attitudes toward physical activity, and structure of the built environment.

The 108 variables shown on the map - the drivers of obesity - were compiled by shiftN, from the 38 science reviews produced for the project and then vetted by the project's science team. The drivers are woven into systemic picture by the positive and negative influence arrows that link the variables into a web of causal relationships.

Natures is a project that explores the dialogue between the natural and the artificial, creating a world where these two elements coexist harmoniously. It consists on a series of audio-visual compositions that simulates organic behaviors through an atypical use of motion tracking techniques.

The melodious movement of plants spinning with the wind triggers an intricate web of computer-generated lines and shapes. Interpreting the organic structures of the plants, the artificial element becomes part of the natural and vice versa.

Natures can be shown both as a single channel or a multi-channel piece.The multi-screens option consists in a large scale high definition video which is projected across 3 adjacent screens. The setup is flexible to be installed vertically or horizontally with 2 or 3 screens.

The interactive installation maeve (MACE-Everyville) provides visual and tangible access to the social and intellectual networks behind architectural projects. The installation is part of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It is on display from September 14th to November 23rd. The project is designed and developed by the Interface Design team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. At the Biennale, maeve connects the entries of the Everyville student competition and puts them into the larger context of MACE content and metadata. By placing physical project cards on an interactive surface, users can explore the presented projects, embedded in an organic network of associated projects, people and media.

The installation consists of an interactive surface and a large projection area. While users are interacting with the contents of the installation on the interactive surface, the network and the media files are displayed on the large projection. The ten winning projects from the Everyville student competition are represented as physical cards. If a card is placed on the interactive surface, a contextual space is opened around the project. Within this space, media files, related projects and keywords are visualized. When a second card is placed on the surface, the space turns into a network displaying similarities between the projects. In addition to the Everyville cards, the installation also contains inspirational projects from the MACE repositories. These projects are also represented by project cards and enable the visitors to connect the Everyville projects to MACE contents. Furthermore, as the interaction with the cards is not limited to the one person, entire groups and teams can explore the content together.

The images shown here are from an etnographic study which resulted in an engaging visual outcome, not common in this type of analysis. As the authors of the study explain: "Much of modern society is defined by material goods. In that sense, people are defined through other people's eyes based on what they do and do not or cannot own. Whether people admit it or not, judgments are made about people based on what they look like and what they own. These judgments might, in some cases, create unspoken bonds but in most cases create barriers between people".

With the goal of representing the cultural similarities between random people, the authors asked 32 participants to list some of the products, and activities that they are involved with: what artists they listen to, what movies they watch, what television shows they watch, what websites they might visit, what brands and accessories they wear, what electronics they own, and where they have lived. After collecting all this information from each participant, they asked them to categorize those products and activities into preset subcultural categories: Bohemian, Casual, Cyber, Nerd, Emo, Gamer, Gangsta, Hardcore, Hippie, Trendy, Indie, F.O.B., Sporty, Preppy, Punk, Rocker, Raggae, Skater. The authors then came up with a taxonomy that allowed the data to be best visualized within the Many Eyes website.

What resulted from this exercise was a deeply complex image showing social trends and unknown bonds between people through those trends. Besides producing a general diagram of subcultures (shown here) based on the data collected from the people who make up those cultures, the authors also created a series of specific diagrams based on particular brands (e.g. Nike, Vans) or subcultural categories (e.g. Trendy, Casual). The general diagram employs an array of colors based on the above-mentioned categories.

In an effort to better understand the patterns within the 2008 presidential candidate donations, the authors produced this interesting diagram, mapping all donations made between January 2007 and July 2008, to McCain (left in red) and Obama (right in blue). The two inner circles represent the total amount of donations for both candidates, while the outer segments illustrate variations in the amounts donated. The top-most bracket is any donation between $1 and $100, the second: $101 - $500, the third: $501 - $,1000 and the final: all amounts over $1,000. The size of each bracket represents the percentage amount that bracket constitutes in a candidate's total donations, and the hair-like lines coming out of them are the names of each donor, which produces a useful visual reference to the density of each category.

The distinction between candidates is immediately perceived with this visualization. As the authors explain: "What is most striking to us is how much more of Obama's donations come from the $1 to $100 bracket. We found a high number of students, artists, unemployed and self-employed people who fell in this bracket. One can speculate that these are the younger-generation individuals who will be voting for the first time or they are a struggling class of lower income workers. Probably more significant: this shows how much internet contributions have helped the Obama campaign, assuming the smaller amounts were made online. This data also shows that a majority of McCain's donations come from the $500 to $1000 bracket of donors. The amount is still smaller than Obama's, but this makes up almost two-thirds of his donations".

Since the donation information must be disclosed to the public, the authors turned to the Federal Election Commission to find a data set containing all donors, the amount they donated as well as other information they may explore in the future (e.g. occupation, zip code, employer). The data set time span is currently from January, 2007 through July, 2008, but the authors will be updating this information every month, as new data is released.

commenTree uses Adobe Flash to essentially mine through hundreds of thousands of MySpace profiles, their biographies, their interests, and their comments. This data is then presented in the form of a graphical network interface displaying users in a organically connected manner. CommenTree aims to explore the various functions meshing real world and online interactions.

Users in the commenTree visualization are presented as orbs of different colors representing their gender, blue - males and pink - females. Each user has an icon associated with them depicting how much they comment. Less talkative individuals are shown with one speech bubble, whereas the most talkative have Three. Comment arcs are drawn between orbs when one user sends another a comment, the text of that comment can be seen scrolling down the side of the visualization so that the entire text body of that comment can be examined along with who is sending and who is receiving. When a orb receives a comment, it is lit brightly so that it can be easilly determined who is currently sending and receiving communication. Users that have accounts but don't send or receive comments (lurkers) have no arcs connected to them. As users cease communicating they fade away creating a visual depth and allowing new communications to be viewed easier.

The data for commenTree was originally collected for a project titled BioMemetics. BioMemetics was deveoloped by the collaboration of Derek Lomas, Ruth West, Todd Margolis, Jurgen Shultz, Jared Chandler, Tiffany Hopkins, Social Movement Laboratory, CRCA, and Calit2.