Category Archives: Crowd Sourcing

How Many Times Has Dr Who Travelled In Time?

August 20, 2010

Timetravel in popular film and tv

Every single Dr Who journey ever. Crowdsourced ultra-geek dataset for The Guardian.

Posted in Crowd Sourcing |
 6 Comments

Hacking India Is Beautiful

July 30, 2010

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.

Here’s the full bus-heatmap mentioned in the piece.

Also posted in Data Visualisation, Guardian Datablog, Political, heat map |
 4 Comments

Cognitive Surplus visualized

July 19, 2010

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.

Also posted in Comparison Chart, Quick, Social Networks |
 45 Comments

What Does Your Soul Look Like?

September 15, 2009

What Does Your Soul Look Like?
I’m trying to create a piece of interactive art. Can you help by drawing something? It should only take 5 minutes.

I’d like you to draw a picture of your soul. How you imagine it to look.

Nothing sinister intended. I’m curious about how different people perceive their ‘soul’.

If enough people do this, it could be really interesting. Because we’ll all be blind to other peoples’ drawings, there’s a chance here to spot patterns, commonalities and any interesting coincidences that might appear across all the souls.

Cooler, we may even be able to build a taxonomy of souls.

At the least, it should be a fascinating, crowd-sourced image…

(This idea was inspired by Waxy’s toyings with Mechanical Turk and The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin.)

Read More »

Also posted in Fun, Group MInd, Self, Taxonomy |
 37 Comments