Berlin based designer and programmer Christopher Warnow had a closer look at the interest graph between people reading the same books. He developed an application that loads recommendations for a given book on Amzon.com and converts visualizes the information as a network. Soon, milieus of interest emerge showing related topics and additional literature.

The application is written in Processing leveraging the power of the open source graph visualization library Gephi Toolkit. You can download the tool and read more information on Christopher’s website.

Jer Thorp, Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times and creative coder extraordinaire, explains the process behind his latest piece for Popular Science in a recent article. The task at hand was to visually represent the complete archive of their publication. The final piece is anchored by a kind of molecular chain – decade clusters in turn contain year clusters. Every atom in these year clusters is a single issue of the magazine, and is shaded with colours extracted from the issue covers via a colour clustering routine. The size of the issue-atoms is determined by the number of words in each issue.

Picking out interesting words from all of the available choices (pretty much the entire dictionary) was a tricky part of the process. I built a custom tool in Processing that pre-visualized the frequency plots of each word so that I could go through many, many possibilities and identify the ones that would be interesting to include in the final graphic. This is a really common approach for me to take – building small tools during the process of a project that help me solve specific problems. For this visualization, I actually ended up writing 4 tools in Processing – only one of which contributed visually to the final result.

It’s excellent to get a glimpse at how such complex yet elegant solutions come together and what decisions were taken along the way. See the related set on Flickr to visually follow the development of the graphic. This isn’t Jer’s first process documentation and if you are not familiar with his work, I strongly recommend to have a look.

The shooting of Mark Duggan on August 4th sparked a series of riots first in Tottenham then across England. The Guardian let you follow their spread on an interactive timeline that shows the most important incidents and how they spread over the different neighborhoods. The user can scroll through a 3D timeline and watch how the riots unfolded. Every event is marked and linked to the belonging article.

From the same team of The Guardian comes another visualization, showing the traffic on Twitter during the riots. The Guardian has compiled a unique database of more than 2.5m tweets related to the riots, showing how Twitter activity explodes after every reported event.

The folks over at Google Chrome  have teamed up with Hyperakt and Vizzuality to put together the 2011 version of the Evolution of the Web visualization. It’s an interactive timeline that shows how the current web technologies have evolved over time. The color bands in the visualization represent the interaction between web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL and browsers that we use daily. Screenshots from past versions of todays browsers are a nice addition (Mosaic 1.0 anyone?). As you would expect, it’s all built using purely open web technologies and the data is provided by Wikipedia and CanIUse.

For this year’s Video Music Awards, MTV looked again at the San Francisco based design studio Stamen to help them visualize what’s happening on Twitter during this major entertainment event. With their experience from recent works for MTV, Stamen extended the VMA Twitter Tracker by three new views on the data: Buzz, Paparazzi and Hot Seat.

Buzz displays the overall and most recent ranking of the stars based on their mentions on Twitter. Portraits of the artists are shown in a Sierpinski-esque layout accompanied by a numeric ranking on the right side of the screen.

Paparazzi is a collection of user submitted photos ranked and scaled based on their retweets.

Hot Seat shows Tweets by artists inside the building based on their location in the audience.

Milan based advertising and graphic design studio H-57 has put together a series of posters that use pictograms to tell biographies of more or less real and more or less important personalities. Don’t take it too seriously — fun for friday, so to speak.

Yesterday Visualizing.org launched version 1.0 of their Visualizing Player, a media player designed specifically for embedding and displaying infographics and data visualizations.

Perhaps its best feature is that it’s nearly agnostic of the visualization format. Right now it supports HTML5, Java, Flash, PDF, Video, Image, and whole websites. Functionality of the player adapts to each format; interactive visualizations and videos are launched via a play button, high resolution images can be zoomed and panned to explore details.

It also features a full-screen mode which launches a seperate browser window and is especially suited for interactive visualizations. It allows the user to favorite (account required), share and embed, and download a visualization. As Visualizing.org is one of the few platforms that cares for proper licensing (all content is CC-licensed), you won’t have to worry about being allowed to embed and share visualizations with the Visualizing Player.

Here’s what an embedded interactive Flash visualization looks like:

And a static infographic (with zoom and pan functionality):

As with any 1.0 release, there are still a few quirks and loose ends. Especially when displaying website and HTML content, there sometimes seem to be scaling issues and too many scrollbars appear. Some visualizations work around this by launching directly in full screen mode (like Jan Willem Tulp’s Ghost Counties). Also, when panning an image, it inadvertently sticks to the cursor when the mouse is released outside of the Player and then re-enters. But I’m sure the people at Visualizing.org are working hard to release an even better version 1.1.

Small issues aside, we’re pretty excited and think the Visualizing Player is a terrific tool for people to embed and share visualizations. It offers great features for displaying properly licensed interactive and static content, and goes beyond embedding mere screenshots and links. So what do you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? Share them here in the comments or directly on Visualizing.org.

The Berlin-based design studio Golden Section Graphics recently released their second edition of In Graphics. The magazine is published twice per year as a bilingual edition in English and German. The first issue won 10 national and international design prizes, including a bronze award from the ADC Germany and a gold European Design Award in the magazine category.

The cover story explores visually the events around 9/11. From 3D renderings of the plane crashes to a scatterplot comparing casualties of terrorist attacks to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another big feature shows everything you need to know about the Berlin Wall as its’ 50 anniversary comes up in August 2011. The rest of the 90 pages strong magazine is filled with beautifully crafted information graphics explaining the situation in Fukushima, Antarctica, Marathons, Woman Football, Royal Weddings and more. Contributions by illustrator Patrick They, artist Konstantin Voit, and designer and author David McCandless complement the original content by the Golden Section Graphics team.

The second edition of In Graphics is once again an extremely well put together piece of information design. Beside the quality of the works inside, it’s also a joy to feel the texture of the paper, the well crafted binding and the thickness of the magazine — Lovely!

Joe Golike and Sha Hwang of Trulia take a deeper look at when crime typically happens throughout the day in 25 big cities across the United States. The result, When does crime happen? is a set of interactive stacked area charts that allow for detailed comparison between different types of crimes and high-level comparison between different cities. On hover, a tooltip reveals more detailed information and the percentage of reported crimes per type and hour. I think the small multiples work pretty fine for comparison over cities and the charts show the data in a readable and elegant way. The visualization is built in HTML5 using Protovis and the underlying data comes from SpotCrime. Read more about their findings on the Trulia Insights blog.

Did you know that noise complaints are the no. 1 quality-of-life issue for city residents? The folks over at Movity.com, before being acquired by Trulia, decided to tackle this issue as a first step in providing detailed information about life quality of different city districts with the TenderNoise project.

In a partnership with Arup and Stamen Design, Movity contributed and worked on the application for the CityCentered Festival 2010. Using decibel readers at major intersections in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, they collected the data in a rather rough resolution, but were able to track over 1.6 million data points for a weekend and weekday. The visualization shows the measured noise levels as bubbles on a map in conjunction with an animated time series that shows the absolute values over time.

What I like about the visualization is, intended or not, the exploration of flicker as a attribute to represent information. Areas with extreme variations in noise level seem more “nervous”. While flicker isn’t a precisely readable attribute, it is definitely capable to convey information to the user. Leveraging the digital medium we have more visual features, like direction and velocity of motion, at our disposal (see Perception in Visualization by Christopher G. Healey).