Geek Tuesday: Data Immersion Gone Wild

Making sense of the world one dataset at a time, or what Mahnattan men and the poverty line have in common.

It’s no secret we’re huge (HUGE) data visualization junkies here. So we’re all over UUorld, a fantastic new immersive mapping environment that helps you makes sense of the data through highly intuitive visual analysis.

UUorld, pronounced [world], uses four-dimensional mapping — an approach that exposes the spatial and temporal context implicit to virtually all data, revealing insight far deeper and more compelling than any brain-numbing array of numbers splattered on an Excel spreadsheet could. (Which doesn’t surprise us, given the overwhelming evidence for the visual-spatial sketch pad’s role in cognition, comprehension and memory.)

While UUorld is capable of analyzing international trends and patterns, it also allows you to zoom in on sub-national elements like states, counties and even cities. The software comes with an enormous portal of free data, or you can import your own to visualize. The maps you build are highly customizable, so you can flex your creative muscle and art-direct your data visualizations to aesthetic perfection.

Visualizations and maps are downloadable in a variety of formats, including KML — which means you can export your data creations to Google Earth, plotting your data in its planetary context. And because Google Earth has an open API, we can only begin to imagine the fascinating potential for crowd-sourcing data visualization from UUorld users, eventually building an immense global library of trends and patterns that help us better understand our world and each other.

We’d love to see UUorld eventually explore the dynamic, creative potential of rich data analysis by partnering with data visualization artists like Chris Jordan, Aaron Koblin and Jonathan Harris.

A robust non-commercial version of UUorld is available for free, or you can go Pro for just $49, which we think is beyond reasonable for you get.

And if you aren’t ready to commit just yet, go ahead and explore the data gallery — you’ll find such delightful edutainment as the percentage of households run by single mothers, U.S. magnetic field intensity, a state-by-state dissection of the Obama stimulus package, and the average earnings of Manhattan men.

You may also enjoy:

• Sign of The Times: Data Visualization Heaven 158 years of the cultural dialog, replayed and rewritten in visual language. ...
• Geek Mondays: Dating Data Art Why 1.7 million people yearn to have their balloons popped every day and what the MoMA has to do with matchmaking. Jonathan Harris, of We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt fame, is one of our all-time favorite data artists working in what we like to call “information aesthetics.” His...
• Accidents: The Abstract Art of Data Visualization Goofs What New York City homicide rates have to do with Beijing circa 1917 and Twitter – the makings of a new "metamodernism" art genre....
• Geek Wednesdays: The Ephemeral Web A modern time machine for data and what we can learn about the web from Victorian toys. With the constant proliferation of data and its spread across the social web, we’re closer than we think to what Kevin Kelly has dubbed the One Machine. The final leap in information systems...
• Data Flow, The Sequel An ambitious anthology of the most important information visualization of the past several years....

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 6:33 am in culture, open-source, software and was tagged data visualization, software.