UPDATE: The presentation is online:
I gave a presentation on data visualization at Ignite Salt Lake last night, and I thought it went pretty well. (I wasn’t hiding my face and sneaking out of the theater afterward.)
Here are the slides from the night with my notes.
I Once Was Blind: Building an Information Visualization That Means Something
I’ll post video as soon as it becomes available.
Below are links to the visualizations that I referenced:
Slide 3 (overview): Visualization of the Stimulus Bill
Slide 5 (Ask a question, tell a story): Charles Minard’s info vis of Napoleon’s march
Slide 9 (Size Visualization Example): Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” visualized with Wordle
Slide 11 (Color Visualization Example): Map of the Market – stock market visualization
Slide 13 (Location Visualization Example): Map of flights in the US in a 24 hour period. This actually uses color to indicate altitude (darker is higher, lighter is lower, but I didn’t have time to go into that in my talk.
Slide 15 (Network Visualization Example): My Facebook friends as graphed by Nexus Graphs
Slide 17 (Time Visualization Example): The Baby Name Voyager – an information visualization on when people name their babies what
Slides 18 – 20 (How Much Is a Trillion Dollars?): Visualization of a Trillion Dollars
Places to get data
- Amazon Web Services Data Sets – Including the human genome, DNA sequences, chemical databases, census information, DOT databases on transportation (aviation, highway, bike, maritime, etc)
- New York Times developer site: the NYT has easy APIs for articles, best sellers, campaign finance, user comments, congress, movie reviews, and the New York State Legislature
- Yahoo Developer Network – APIs for finance, traffic, weather, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and many others
- Twitter API documentation
- Bureau of Labor Statistics – Information on all sorts of economic statistics for the US
- FEC Data – public database for all political giving. WARNING: Very poorly kept, standards are obviously not a big deal to these guys
Visualizations I didn’t use, but that are still cool
Twitter tags during the Super Bowl
Google Heat Map of where users look when they get a Google search result (scroll down a bit)
Videos taken in and around Salt Lake City
Twitter network browser – this one is more fun to play with than it is useful