The EagerEyes Labs' mission is to provide tools to gain insight into relevant data to everybody. As part of that, the plan has always been to release the source code. The first piece of code is now published, and more is coming.

Would McCain be the oldest US President? Would Obama be the youngest? Who was the youngest president? Were presidents younger in the past or older? What is the highest number of years a former president lived after leaving office? Who served the longest? Whose term was the shortest? The interactive visualization below lets you answer these and a few other questions.

Treemaps are the single most used 'real' InfoVis technique there is. Interestingly, they have proven to be even more useful for unstructured data than for the hierarchies which they were originally developed for. Here is a brief history, discussion of current practical uses, and of the importance of treemaps for the adoption and understanding of information visualization.

Kaiser at Junk Charts has posted an interesting challenge based on the question how to visualize an Autism diagnosis dataset in a better way (originally posted by Igor Carron at Nuit Blanche). I'm offering my own redesign of the data below, and discuss my different approach and what it tells us about the visualization of sets in general.

Like in the last few years, the InfoVis Conference 2007 is holding a data visualization contest. While the data is available late this year, we hope that by providing it in a very accessible format (XML), and also supplying program code to get you started (at least if you're using Java), we will attract more submissions. The focus is also more on the design than the data analysis this year, and the questions are much more open-ended (in fact, you can make up your own!).

Social websites are all the rage right now, and are not just hyped by the media (MySpace and YouTube in particular), but there are also large amounts of money involved (again, MySpace and YouTube). But does the social model make sense for data analysis and visualization? And will users play and interact with data the way they do with other media? Two websites were launched recently to find out: Swivel and Many Eyes. Here is a first review, looking at the two sites in terms of their founders, approach, social aspects, technology, capabilities, broad appeal, and ethics.

(Printable PDF)

With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama being likely Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential elections, it is time to look at the demographics of US Presidents over the years. The following diagrams compare their sex, race, and faith with the whole population in 2001.