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Links for My Information Visualization Ignite Talk

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