InformationDynamics

This work constitutes several visual experiments that map the GPS coordinates and velocity of 1534 vehicles circulating in Lisbon, Portugal, during October 2009. That information is condensed in one single virtual day, grouping the data by second and displaying it as an animation.

The white dots are the circulating vehicles at that moment. The trails of the vehicles group themselves into main arteries where the thickness represents traffic intensity. Each trail constitutes a temporary route where the average speed is mapped to its color. Pure green represents average speeds of 60 km/h. Therefore cooler and greenish hues traduce rapid transit arteries, while the sluggish ones are reddish and hotter. There is a visual emphasis on the slower areas, with hot colors traducing sluggish traffic.

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni ? San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency ? showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. Muni is one of America?s oldest public transit agencies and today carries over 200 million customers per year in 80 routes throughout the city and county of San Francisco.

Black lines represent very slow movement under 7 mph. Red are less than 19 mph. Blue are less than 43 mph. Green lines depict faster speeds above 43 mph.

Eric Fischer is also the author of the remarkable Geotaggers' World Atlas.

The goal of this project is to question the top-down categorization and evaluation of music by the music industry and its sales charts by using Twitter as an alternative ranking system.

Authors tracked the number of times a song was quoted in Twitter messages as an indicator of its 'ratings' in the world in order to create a parallel rating system. As the authors explain, these new 'music charts' could give us a more accurate insight into the perceived 'value' of the song. These 'grassroot' charts are based on the influence of songs on people?s everyday lives, on the real emotions they evoke, and on the associations they create in people?s minds, unlike official music industry charts that are primarily based on album sales and the commercial success of the artist.

This radial visualization (part of a larger set of visual components) shows Twitter user activity around popular song titles.

I first saw this project on the Show me the Data event in May 2010. Organized by Marcel Worring, Raul Ni�o Zambrano, and Yuri Engelhardt, this marked the public presentation of nine multidisciplinary data visualization projects developed by Master students of the University of Amsterdam and the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design. The invited lecturers, Daniel Aguilar (Bestiario), Erik-Jan van der Linden (MagnaView), and myself, symbolically nominated this the winning project due to its in-depth multivariate analysis.

Using data from the CIA World Factbook, this interactive application tracks the commercial ties between most countries across the globe, allowing for a variety of comparisons and insights. The system is developed for a webkit browser so it will work better in Chrome or Safari.

These images are part of a large collection of fifty city maps tracing geotagged photos from Flickr and Picasa. Eric Fischer determined the speed at which photographers travelled the various urban landscapes by analyzing their photos' timestamps and geotags, and plotting them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each city, and include various metropolises like New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Barcelona, Vancouver, and Hong Kong.

The first map is from the city of London and the second from San Francisco.

Most Americans know that the US government spends an insane amount of their tax dollars on defense, but how do you show just how much they spend compared to all other areas in the country? In order to answer this query the authors created a visualization mapping federal spending against media coverage. They wanted to use a minimal approach with no labeling necessary. The design says it all and shows what almost 70% of a budget going to defense looks like compared to all other departments (Education gets around 1%).

The authors used the New York Times API to parse through all articles written in 2009. Using key words that dealth with characteristics of each governmental agency, they displayed their frequency usage in comparison with one another. The colors on the right rings are representative of their colors from the left. What we see is that all of the much less-budgeted agencies from the left ring are discussed far more in the news. The Department of Health and Humand Services, which was a major issue of discussion in 2009 with health care reform being heatly debated only accounts for about 4% of the US federal budget, though it's the most discussed issue in the media.

Xiaoji Chen is a 1st year SMArchS student in Design and Computation at MIT. As part of her work in the SENSEable City's workshop, Xiaoji developed a series of maps of the city of Paris, where the distance between a spot and the city center is not proportional to their geographical distance, but to the cost it takes to get there.

One of her interesting comparisons maps several means of transport within the city of Paris according to the amount of released CO2 (kg). According to Xiaoji this approach is an appealing alternative to the mobile version of Goggle Maps.

Commissioned by the Design Museum, Poke developed an animated map charting the history of digital design in London. It maps the growth, death and merging of main design agencies in the city of London from 1994 to 2009.

As Poke explains: "The digital design industry is the very epitome of rapid change, so we decided to make an interactive, time-based map. This allowed us to demonstrate that speed, as well as show off the advantages of a digital approach. The creation of a map also meant we could chronicle the geographical movement across the capital, triggered by a high rate of agency mergers, acquisitions and deaths, in a visually commanding way."

Everyday our mailboxes are flooded with unsolicited offers of porn material, pirate software, viagra, illegal financial services and advice on women seduction. A quick glance at the spam mailbox always provides fresh inspiration: bizarre subjects guides us in the quest for the definitive answer to fundamental human problems. But the crisis is striking and we must recycle.

Instead of sweeping spam under the carpet, the authors of SpamGhetto decided to save some junk-mail in order to turn it into a wallpaper before it's too late, since as they proclaim "someday a brilliant scientist will find the definitive solution to eradicate from the web the bittersweet pleasure of spam".

If you provide them with your room's dimensions, they can produce a SpamGhetto design wrapping and folding around shapes and objects on your wall's surface.

Since the terroristic attack on the World Trade Center on september 11th, 2001, and the following invasion by the Allied forces in Afghanistan in order to fight the Taliban regime and Al-Quaida, the Western countries are involved in an ongoing conflict which seems to have no end.

When the authors started researching this topic they realized that the debate whether to pull out the troops, staying, or even reinforcing, is not so much about arguments, it's a battle of possible scenarios. Every side seems to have their own positive and negative visions of how things will happen in the future if certain steps are achieved. The resulting map The Afghan Conflict - A Map of Possible Scenarios is an attempt to summarize possible scenarios around the afghan conflict, according to a pullout or stay of the Allied troops. And is based on interviews with journalists, politicians and political foundations.