Posts tagged with infographics

André Michelle, inspired by the TENORI-ON, created a grid-sequencer called ToneMatrix. It's an interactive experience written in Flash 10 that merges graphics, visualization, interactivity, and music. There are also iPhone knock-offs such as the free TonePad. As for ToneMatrix, click here to check it out and create your own tunes. Here's one of mine.

Eine Kleine ToneMatrixMusik from S Woodside on Vimeo.

You can also right-click on the ToneMatrix flash app and copy/paste numerical sequences to load and save your music. The sequence for the above is:

98386,1024,4096,1024,67474,96,65540,32768,65618,1024,64,0,65618,4,65600,0

Share and enjoy.

Who Will Get What? This is an information graphic based on Health Insurance Reform in Three Steps by Nicholas Beaudrot. I thought it would work better in this format, which shows the proportions of people as the thickness of the lines.

If you have updated/more correct numbers post them—I might roll an updated version.

This is licensed CC-Attribution-ShareAlike!

Also available on Flickr.

I was just reading this article on The Vets for Freedom faux grassroots movement . If there's one think that I don't like, it's astroturfing. See why at wikipedia . Especially political astroturfing, the worst kind.

The web of connections in the article is pretty confusing so I came up with this information graphic to try to untangle it a bit.

I have large versions in Some links between Republicans and Swift Vets and Vets for Freedom (PDF) suitable for printing at any size, and also bitmaps in PNG , and JPEG .

Keep an eye on this page and / or the blog generally, as I may update the infographic if more information becomes available.

It's licensed under creative commons CC-BY-SA , so if you want the original file (in OmniGraffle ) let me know.

I cross-posted this on sbwoodside's diary on DailyKos . If you want to comment, you can do so there (or just email me).

Oliver Byrne ("Surveyor of Her Majesty's settlements in the Falkland Islands and author of numerous mathematical works") made a masterpiece of information graphics in 1847, giving forth the Elements of Euclid in a visual format.

You can see the whole entire thing (OK, actually just the first 6 books, but isn't that enough?) at the University of British Columbia s Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid site. The pictures are very cool.

Buckminster Fuller was obsessed with this word "dymaxion" which I think was supposed to be a combination of "dynamic" and "maximum". He created this "dymaxion map" of the world which was intended to have the least possible distortion of the shape of the land features. Have a good look at it.

One thing that's interesting about it I think is that Africa is really much bigger than North America. The "usual" map projection (Mercator) is really terrible because it totally accentuates the size of land masses that are close to the poles. So that N.A., Europe, and Australia are all way too big. Here you can see the truth.

Another interesting discovery for me is the small size of India. I always thought that India was a bit bigger than that. The arctic is also rather small. The Himalaya is very prominent. And I like the curving shape of the islands from Alaska down the eastern side of Asia.

You can also see how the continents all seem to almost be connected into one big island surrounded by water.

The funny shape of the map is because it's designed to be folded up into a roughly spherical shape. Here's an amazing animation of the dymaxion map folding and unfolding .

And here's the Buckminster Fuller FAQ .

Check out this amazing book "Around the World in a Flash" with Marie Neurath's brilliant information graphics.

Disruptive technology has a bit of a buzzword reputation. On the other hand, the Christensen book is always on people's lists as a good book. So I bought it and checked it out.

As it turns out, most people seem to be either wrong or only partly right when they define disruptive tech. There's big gaps missing in the Wikipedia entry , Dvorak gets it wrong , and even Cringely (surprise surprise) misses the boat .

Based on my new understanding straight from the book, I drew up this infographic / visual explanation (click for hig-rez PDF). I decided to zoom in on camera phones, since they are clearly a disruptive tech and show signs of blowing away the digital camera business the next year or two.

The graph is basically three-dimensional. The vertical axis is megapixels. The horizontal axis is the progress of time. And the third dimension (represented here with colour) is the market.

The point is that disruptive technologies initially enter into a new market that has different values. With camera phones, the highest value is that it's always at hand, wherever you go.

The disruption occurs when the new technology suddenly meets the needs of the old market as well. Then it suddenly (and seemingly "out of nowhere") takes over completely.

After reading this Sunday Times article by Ron Suskind I realized that the best explanation for W's behaviour is that he believes what he says. In this light, I put together this information graphic of what he believes the world to be like. I don't endorse this world view; it is constructed based on the best available evidence from transcripts of his speeches and media reports. I do not believe that any of this material is controversial. If you have additional information, please email me .

Available in PDF 128K and GIF 80K . Creative Commons.

This is an updated version of the graphic from this earlier version .

Also available: large GIF (100K) and also if you want the highest quality for printing, PDF file (900K) or EPS file (4.4 MB !!!!)

It says: George W. Bush / Vietnam-era Service Record / The chart data is based only on documents released by the US government.

An infographic / information graphic is a visual explanation. The point is to visualize some data, information, wisdom, story, etc, into a form that appeals to the visual centers of the brains. A well made infographic, in my opinion, can explain some concepts much better than text.

The kingpins of infographics in my opinion are Edward E. Tufte and Nigel Holmes . You can find some kick-ass examples of their graphics on their sites and even more if you dive into google's image search, I'll make it easy for you, holmes , tufte1 , and tufte2 . Tufte's specialty is in the visualization of data, and he's written a number of books on the subject that are basically famous and required reading—I almost never buy books but I just picked up "Envisioning Information". Nigel Holmes is more on the side of explaining concepts which may not be so much data but more like stories, like a lot of news stories, various technical concepts and so on.

Update: There's a new version 1.1 now that's a lot easier to read (but shows the same data).

Here's a visual explanation of W's air national guard record. I used only documents released by the military (in other words, official service documents) to build the graphic.

small GIF

large GIF

Also available in best quality: PDF 1.2 MB .

Most of the documents I sourced can be found either at coldfeet or through slate .

Here's an image I prepared based on a story about Karl Rover's smear campaign tactics in salon.com . My graphic illustrates the story's claims. I haven't personally fact-checked it at all.

I deliberately chose salon colours and I obviously have higher-resolution versions available.