You wouldn’t expect to find such beauty in the Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Ninth Census (1870) from the Library of Congress, would you? Sophisticated data visualizations, hand-calculated and hand-engraved, in beautiful colors, prepared by a staff headed by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintedent of the ninth census.
The display above shows you, for each U. S. state and territory, the proportion of the church-going population (the colored boxes) relative to the total population (the shaded box in which the colored boxes are set), as well as the breakdown by the top 11 denominations!
An amazing/creepy visualization of what life might be like when we are “jacked in” to a virtual overlay 24/7. Lots of great little details in the animation. Note the sea of advertising that can be controlled, paying you more money per second depending on your environmental saturation.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.
A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.
Crayola’s Law Posted on January 19th, 2010 at 8:57 pm by Steve
The chart above is a lovely info-graphic showing the introduction of colors into the Crayola crayon box over time. The creator of the chart derived from the data Crayola’s Law: the number of crayon colors doubles every 28 years.
Damn It’s Cold! Posted on December 30th, 2009 at 2:37 pm by Steve
The image above is the daily trace of data from the weather station atop the Green Building at MIT (pictured below). The top box shows you the temperature, which dropped from 32°F to 10°F in 24 hours… the second box shows the steadily rising barometric pressure… the third box shows the wind speeds with gusts above 60 MPH and sustained wind speeds well above 40 MPH – the Green Building is about 300 feet tall, so it’s well above any obstructions and hence records higher wind speeds than ground stations.
Serge Brunier has created an incredible 360-degree panorama he calls “The Sky of the Earth:”
The images were collected from two exceptional astronomical sites, the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere.
It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations, its thousands year old stars, whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.
I’m a huge fan of Stamen Design out of San Francisco. One of the things they excel at is data-driven map presentations. And SF Crimespotting (pictured above) is a terrific example thereof!
I do a lot of map-based presentation, and I’ve leaned heavily on their work in the past (particularly their open-source project ModestMaps).
For those of you in the East Bay, you might also check out their original work in this genre, Oakland Crimespotting.
