News.com: Hot news visualizations

Unknown: Airport flight densities

The new VisualComplexity site seems to have been an instant hit, with everybody and their sister linking it. Is data visualization ready to hit entertainment mainstream? Will Ben Fry find a welcome side income from publishing posters that will adorn the walls of teenage abodes? Will budget art book publisher Taschen soon produce a glossy coffee table work on infoviz?

Perhaps not. But it’s interesting to note that News.com has added two visualization oldie goldies (the treemap and the associative network) to their traffic-driving sidebar. Such a move would have been considered daring only a few years ago. After all they make their money from page clicks and can’t afford to lose any. So it follows logically that they assume that using dynamic visualizations rather than lists of headlines will drive more traffic. Knowing the internet business, they’ve probably done usability studies on it too.

That diagrams are beautiful can’t be denied, though not always intentionally. On his tecznotes blog Michael Migurski posted a reference to this visually attractive 1981 visualization of flight traffic density between different cities. In low resolution it looks like a street art piece by the London Police.

Martin Wattenberg: Color Code

Martin Wattenberg has released a new project called Color Code for AIGA’s online journal Loop. He describes it as “a full-color portrait of the English language.”

Color Code uses a Treemap visualization to show 33000 words. Each word has been colorized according to the average colors of images found on Yahoo image search using the word as a search term. The words are grouped by meaning, and can be explored interactively by zooming in and out of different clusters of related words.

Martin used the same Treemap algorithm for the Map of the Market visualization of the stock market, which has become a real-world computational design classic.