Visualizations For A Better Understanding

Written by on July 10, 2011. Published in News.

We are just at the beginning to see really exciting infographics, interactive charts and various kind of visualizations on the web. News companies like The Guardian are at the forefront, just remember what they came up with regarding wikileaks.

For us at futurechallenges (open) data visualization is an important issue. As our content grows we are planning to provide various forms of it – simply to foster a better understanding what these correlations of megatrends are all about. Our trend navigator is a first step in this direction. Currently we are collecting ideas and exploring opportunities. So please feel free to come up with suggestions – they are highly appreciated.

Here are a few examples of what we like:

peoplemovin shows the flows of migrants as of 2010 through the use of open data. The data are presented as a flow chart that shows the connections between countries. The chart is split in two columns, the emigration countries on the left and the destination countries on the right. The thickness of the lines connecting the countries represents the amount of immigrated people.

When Sea Levels Attack – The rise of H2O

Arhis – a great visualization of a timeline

Visualizing.org is a community of creative people working to make sense of complex issues through data and design… and it’s a shared space and free resource to help you achieve this goal.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. Not all projects shown are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.