I was just put onto this by a ex-colleague (@insightr) .

Its another one of the great NY Times visualizations, and whilst I have some mis-givings about its value, it still shows some wonderful trends just from a quick view of what is happening in NYC.

Take a look at it and see the trends between the Bronx and Manhattan, and the trends within Manhattan, some differences within Lower vs Upper Manhattan, as mentioned in the Arts Beat Blog Post on NY Times.

My mis-givings about this, whilst it is showing interesting trends for 2009 films by each individual title, it would be quite compelling to look at the aggregate for each genre, as I believe that would show even more significant differences, certainly within the NYC area, just a thought…

This is a fascinating project developed by OriginsInfo, Experian and Geowise.

It provides a wealth of information about the geography and spread of names, both Family Names and Personal Names across the globe.  Below is details from mapyourname.com that details how they have done this.

“To create this website we have examined the names of 360,000,000 people currently alive in the United States, Australia and most of Western Europe. For almost all of these people Mapyourname will reveal the parts of the world from which their personal and family names originate.

For the 60,000 most common family names Mapyourname will show their spread not just at country level but right down to the level of individual regions. From these maps most of you should be able to pinpoint the ancestral heartland of your name, and your friends’ and colleagues’ names, the place where your distant blood relations live, the location of your genetic home.”

Excellent work that I can quite easily spend hours on looking around at where my friends and colleagues names are most popular.

I came across this chart whilst catching up with my blog reading the other day.  Its part of a post on Christopher Niemanns Blog with New York Times

Continue reading →

This is a more detailed, but not as analytically minded version of the Choosing A Good Chart a document helping choose which chart.

The above version is posted as part from http://www.visual-literacy.org ”Visual Literacy: An E-Learning Tutorial on Visualization for Communication, Engineering and Business”, it covers more than charting and touches into various different information delivery mechanisms.  Very Cleverly Done as the periodic table, completely interactive with examples.

Both are very good reference points for what is possible with data…

This is a cool visualization creating using Google Docs and the available API (it takes a while to refresh be patient).

Google Visualization

The idea was to show the client how product categories change and grow over time, each dot is a product category, against revenue growth and weekly change in sales.   The ability to provide an interaction for the clients, rather than static charts was the real winner.