I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.
He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.
Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.
The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.
All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar
This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.
So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.
(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)
“Live-vizzing” a graphic on the UK government’s emergency budget for The Guardian and Open Knowledge Foundation.
Depressing update of our original DeepWater Horizon image.
The oil spill is now on track to be the 3rd worst in history, depositing the equivalent of 22,000 cars worth of oil into the sea every day.
More info and our data in this online spreadsheet: http://www.bit.ly/InDeepWater
The Taxonomy Of The Apple iPhone.
A very smart and good-looking analysis of the infrastructure that supports the existence of the iPhone from Ben Millen. Both from a physical point of view and a Heideggerian perspective, in the context of culture and society.
(Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Excellent.)
You can zoom on the two images here and here.
(Having to zoom into these images is annoying. Visualizations don’t always work that well on screen. They’re usually much better in print. Someone ought to create a sumptuous, colourful coffee-table book of these things, I think).
Great places-to-avoid heatmap using distribution of photos on Panoramio. Nice idea! By BlueMoon.ee
Data: http://bit.ly/IntNoOnes
Note: Roll over the main image to see the countries.
Review the changes we’ve made to this image
|
|
Hacking India Is Beautiful
This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister’s delegation to India as part of contingent of ‘hackers’ and civic-minded dataheads. We did a hack day with some of India’s leading developers and visualizers.
Check out their great, ingenious work in this post for The Guardian.
| Leave a comment