I’ve come across this excellent series of visualizations by Nikki Graziano, photography & mathematics student at R.I.T. The captured shapes and structures in the images are explained by mathematical equations both visually and numerically.

NikkiGraziano.com

Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg from Hint.fm show us the colors of a year in a surprising way. The visualization is based on photographs from the Bostom Common taken from Flickr.com and rendered using a custom application.

Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel.

Together with Heather Burke the final visualization was combined with some of the original images and presented in  Boston Magazine.

Visual artist Chris Jordan is working with photography, structure, patterns, repetition, contrast, etc to create stunning large-scale pieces. He describes his works as follows:

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Jordan’s work is a great example of how large numbers can be read without the need to display exact figures. The amount is rather felt than read thus communicating statistics in a much more personal way than using a sterile diagram.