Blog 2007

With Tax Day (Observed) in the US tomorrow on Tuesday (even the IRS gets confused), I felt like a link to Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go would be in order. This beautiful information graphic breaks spending down into all the ‘small’ things that tax money is spent on, from the FCC to the Army Corps of Engineers. A zoomable interface similar to Google Maps makes it possible to explore this huge graph. As Terry Yoo likes to say, the government’s a big place! – and this graph gives you an idea just how much there is.
[Read more…] about Death and Taxes

Enormous amounts of information are technically freely available, but are hard to access in practice. A lot of that data comes from data collection funded by taxpayers, or from data that needs to be reported for legal reasons. While much of that data has been lying around on the Internet for some time, only recently have people started building tools that make it easy (and often even fun) to play with it. Even though the types of data are very different, all these tools have one thing in common: they are primarily visual.
[Read more…] about Visualization Sets Information Free

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!).
[Read more…] about InfoVis Contest 2007 Data

An anonymous commenter asked what the savings were of the Travelling Presidential Candidate Map (ZIPTPCMap) vs. the ZIPScribbleMap. That was not something I had even thought about, and so the result was quite surprising.
[Read more…] about What Travelling Presidential Candidates Save

A user in a thread on MetaFilter that linked to the US ZIPScribble Map pointed to a drawing that has an uncanny resemblance to the map: Saul Steinberg’s Hen. The bloggy thing of course would have been to just take the image from somewhere and put it next to the map to show it. Instead, I asked for permission. You can probably guess how well that worked.
[Read more…] about An Uncanny Resemblance

The family of ZIPScribble Maps is growing. This update adds maps for a dozen countries, most of them European.
[Read more…] about More ZIPScribble Maps: AT, AU, CA, CH, DE, ES, FR, HU, IT, NL, NO, SE

The ZIPScribble Maps of the US obviously hit a nerve, with over 55,000 unique visitors in about two weeks, and more than 70 comments. There was also some criticism, especially regarding some slight problems with coloring the states, and that some of the dividing lines were not, in fact, state lines (and that it was not easy to compare them to state lines). For reasons of convenience, I had also left out Alaska and Hawaii, and there were requests for similar maps for more countries. The US maps have just been updated to solve almost all of the above problems (except for AK and HI, which are included in separate maps for now), and ZIPScribbles for several other countries will be published in the next few days. An interactive version is also in the works.
[Read more…] about Improved US ZIPScribble Maps, more Countries to Come