14 examples of data visualization on the web

Blog post by on

Trend spotting

A series of websites use APIs and scrape pages to spot and analyze trends:

Politics

  • Ushahidi – creates a dynamic map of the flood emergency and where help is needed after the Haiti earthquake.
  • The worlds best countries – a comparative study of health, educuation, economy, and politics in the countries of the world.

We Feel Fine

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar has build an engine that constantly scrapes the internet for a list of keywords representing feelings (feeling fine, absurd, abused, etc.) and visually shows them in a visually brilliant way.

wefeelfine.org

Crimespotting

Crimespotting and many other map mashups are made by stamen design company – worth a look.

crimespotting.org

Real time transit mashups

How big really?

BBC puts things in perspective by overlaying the affected flood area of Pakistan in July (2010) on a European google map.

howbigreally.com

City heat map by flickr geotag

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers’ World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in places that tourists don’t visit.

Find your city in the flickr set

Information is beautiful

David McCandless’s site, informationisbeautiful.net, is updated frequently with brilliant and often socio-political illustrations of data.

informationisbeautiful.net

Anders Toxboe Author

Based out of Copenhagen, Denmark, Anders Toxboe is a Product Discovery coach and trainer, helping both small and big clients get their product right. He also founded UI-Patterns.com and a series of other projects. Follow Anders at @uipatternscom.