Follow The Money: Visualizing the Structure of Large-Scale Communities

Visual economics, or what virtual currencies have to do with real neighbors.

Money makes the world go ’round. Or so the saying goes. Whether or not that’s true, money does go around the world, wrapping it in an invisible web of socioeconomic and geopolitical patterns.

Northwestern University grad students Daniel Grady and Christian Thiemann are on a mission to visualize these patterns. Their project Follow the Money investigates the structure of large-scale communities in the US through the prism of how money travels. Using data from the popular bill-tracking website Where’s George?, the team identified geographically compact communities based on how much currency is changing hands within them as opposed to between them.

This may sound like dry statistical uninterestingness, but the video visualization of the results is rather eye-opening, revealing how money — not state borders, not political maps, not ethnic clusters — is the real cartographer drawing our cultural geography.

When we made the video, we wanted to produce something that anybody could watch and understand what was happening, but at the same time we didn’t want to have to dumb down any of the ideas.” ~ Daniel Grady

The project was a winner at the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by the National Science Foundation and AAAS and.

But as cash nears extinction in the age of plastic and electronic transations, we’d be curious to see a visualization of payment networks in all the forms and formats today’s money lives in — physical, electronic, and even virtual currencies like Facebook’s AceBucks, World of Warcraft’s gold, or Second Life’s Linden dollars.

via Visual Complexity

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Cartograms: Making a Point with Distorted Maps

Why space is relative and how popular media are making entire continents disappear.

We love maps. And we love data visualization. Naturally, we love cartograms — maps of countries and areas distorted to reflect non-geographic information about them. These representations provide a succinct and visually digestible way to comprehend complex data about the world’s hisotrical, social, political, economic and health reality, among other issues of interest. Today, we look at three particularly eye-opening cartograms that put today’s geopolitical and socioeconomic reality in perspective.

EXTERNAL DEBT

As the world continues to try to make sense of the full context and implications of the financial crisis, University of Sheffield postgrad Ben Henning took a look at the real dimension of the world’s external debt. The map reflects the ratio of debt to GDP, based on 2010 estimates by the World Bank and CIA.

In case you were wondering — or looking for an economically stable place to move to — that green patch amidst the European redness is Luxembourg, doing even better than the stereotypical financial forerunner in yellow right below, Switzerland.

NEWS

There’s no question that news media shape our perception of the world. But, in just four minutes, head of Public Radio International Alisa Miller shows just how distorted the news’ portrayal of the world can be.

Miller’s eye-opening talk embodies the core of why we believe citizen journalism will be a potent game-changer in news, the real “fair and balanced” way to do things.

POPULATION

Today’s moderately educated adult has no qualms about the world’s overpopulation problem. But this issue is as much one of scale as it is of distribution. Earth’s bloated population, combined with its uneven and disproportionate distribution, makes for a number of social, economic and environmental hazards. This cartogram presents a map of the world, with land areas weighted for population size, making all these disbalances unmissably prominent.

Seeing overcrowded India and China explode while Russia and Canada, with their vast, barren and unpopulated Arctic landscapes, shrink does bring the notion of “public space” to life by visualizing, effectively and powerfully, the relationship between “space” and “the public.”

BONUS

The Daily Mail, a source of otherwise questionable reliability and taste level, has a surprisingly excellent series of cartograms that paint an issue-weighted portrait of the world.

Though three years old, the maps are incredibly eye-opening, reflecting everyting from alcohol consumption to HIV prevalence to toy exports.

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Art for the Age of Transparency: BBC DataArt

Layman geekery, or what documentary footage has to do with 3D and Brian Eno.

We’re big proponents of data visualization and believe it’s a potent tool for making sense of the increasing amount of information we’re being bombarded with. But despite a slew of fantastic work in this space over the past few years, there’s still relatively low public awareness and understanding of data viz as a creative discipline and a sensemaking tool.

That’s why we have high hopes for DataArt, a new project out of BBC Backstage aiming to offer examples of using data visualization in artistic and informative ways. Educational in nature, the learning portal is as much a showcase of compelling work as it is an introduction to the storytelling power of information visualization and a toolkit for joining this growing movement.

The DataArt project aims to introduce people to the power of information visualisation as a contemporary media form of increasing importance.

In an age where institutional transparency is no longer a courtesy but a demand, and companies, governments and other public entities are opening up their data to the public, the DataArt project offers a promising toolkit for understanding how ordinary people fan use data visualization to do anything from making better-informed decisions to expressing themselves creatively. With tools, tutorials, sample computer code and access to copyright-free data sources, the site is both a starting point and a destination, catering to a wide range of technical expertise levels and creative inclinations.

In blurring the boundary between art and information we hope this site will appeal to audiences interested in data visualisation in general, digital art and design, those interested in the BBC and those looking at data visualisation from an educational perspective.

Though currently pulling only from BBC data, the idea is to eventually sample other public sources as well. Four projects have been released so far: Flared Music is a simple Flash visualization displaying the relationships between musicians using the BBC Music API; 3D Documentary Explorer is an experiment in interactive storytelling, allowing you to look at the source material used in BBC documentaries in 3D; SearchWeb offers a tree-style glimpse of how BBC site search results are distributed across different categories; News Globe lets you search the BBC News & Sport website by keyword, with results plotted on a globe.

The project also encourages participation and collaboration, urging users to contribute and share their own work on the site. Part VisualComplexity, part GapMinder, part Processing, DataArt offers a promising wide-angle view of data visualization as an exploratory tool and a creative discipline.

We do hope to see more user-contributed work as well as a wider array of public data sets to play with.

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