These images are part of an animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.

OpenStreetMap started in 2004 and the rate of contributions is accelerating with four times as many people contributing to the project in 2008 compared to 2007. During the year, edits were made by some 20,000 individuals and there were bulk imports of data for many places, including the USA, India, Italy and Belarus which are clearly visible in the animation.

The first image shows the recent bulk import of data from Belarus and plenty of work going on in Spain, Finland and England in July 2008. Notice also the burst of activity Ireland during the State of the Map conference which took place in Limerick in July. Germany is, as always, glowing brightly. The second image shows major contributors (represented by different colors) to OpenStreetMap in the bay area of California.

This animation was produced by ITO. Various still images are available on flickr.

Daniel McLaren has built a Facebook friends visualization using his own flash-based graph visualization tool called Constellation. The interface lets you see which of your friends know each other. At any given time it will show one of your friends as the selected node (in bold), and any mutual friends as additional nodes. Lines between nodes represent friendships. Clicking a node will select it and you and the new person's mutual friends will appear. Finally, the colour of the circles represents gender: yellow is female, purple is male, and grey is unknown.

The information cannot be retrieved all at once so you'll find that the visualization will constantly change as more information comes in. It takes a while to load the data but it (usually) gets more interesting the longer you wait. Watching the nodes re-arrange themselves is fun, but also processor-heavy. If you have a lot of friends the CPU load will be pretty high.

The goal of City Murmur is to show how the media differently describes the urban space through the attention that is given to each street of a city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the online presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.

CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams, not as passive representation of realities, but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narrative, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.

CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one was Madrid, as a result of the Visualizar'08 workshop. The media space is composed by a RSS feed pool containing 733 sources. Starting from an official list of Spanish media, the authors classified all the sources and their RSS feeds through denotative categories (topic, type and impact), while also tagging some of them with connotative categories. Once the RSS feed is downloaded, and an in-depth scanning of the news is performed, each post is matched against the OpenStreetMap street database to check if a street, a place of interest or a district in the city is mentioned. When a particular news item is related to a specific element of the city, a Murmur comes to life.

Twiter Friends Browser is a fun, simple and light application (5k according to the author) that allows you to browse through all your twitter friends. You can start by typing a particular twitter username to immediately see all their connections and latest updates. You can then continue clicking and dragging in an endless friend-of-a-friend network.

TeleGeography's new Global Internet Map draws upon their annual Global Internet Geography research to provide a unique view of the world's Internet backbone architecture.

The map's global projection traces the intercontinental links between the countries of Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and Africa. Regional close-ups provide insight into key routes within each region. Nine accompanying figures and tables present valuable data on Internet bandwidth by country, regional and global Internet capacity growth, backbone providers, traffic by application, wholesale pricing, and broadband user growth.

The map can also be purchased as a poster for a special price until the end of December.

This radial diagram produced by The New York Times and Martin Krzywinski, the developer of Circos, represents the number of small molecules, called methyl groups, attached to segments of chromosome 22 across seven different types of human tissue. Methyl groups are one part of the epigenome, which controls how genes are expressed in different types of cells.

Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract over time.

The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people. Burak only mapped the interconnections between friends, removing himself from the picture, and then labeled the 6 main clusters: "MIT", "silicon valley", "web programming", "generative art", "Istanbul", and "web business tr (Turkey)". As he explains: "The silicon valley cluster is large and dense compared to others. The MIT cluster is almost like a clique (every person connected to every other). Generative art is quite close to Silicon Valley, mostly bridged through the user neb. Obviously the Turkish web business cluster has many connections to the Silicon Valley, techcrunch being a major bridge here. The web programming cluster is very small, surprisingly it is connected to Silicon Valley only through the user al3x, who works at Twitter".

To test the importance of key bridging users, Burak decided to remove them and see if the graph still hold together. Many of these changes are represented on his map of week 3 (second image) where more bridges and denser clusters are discernible within his network of 158 people.

Apart from a careful analysis of some of the patterns emerging in this experiment, which can be further explored in his blog post, Burak poses an important question worth considering: "Do these people mind about what these diagrams reveal about their privacy, while all the data is public?".

Keith Peters is a generative artist who works mostly in ActionScript 3.0. The images shown here are just part of a growing body or remarkable work which he showcases on his website Art From Code. The quality of the work is almost as impressive as Keith's unpretentiousness. As he explains: "Sometimes I make something that looks nice and put it up here. I call it 'generative art' (...) Other people have different ideas on exactly what generative art means, or what a piece has to consist of or what should have gone into it in order for it to merit that title. So it's up to you what you want to call it. I hope you like how some of them look anyway".

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.