It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize.

Even more Afghan visualizations thanks to WikiLeaks are available  at Visualizing Data.

Guess which link-map representation above is the most efficient for showing directionality? Information Aesthetics blog has an interesting article about the different techniques for showing the “from-” and “to-” of network charts.

Networks are often visualized using points and interconnecting lines, with triangular arrowheads at one or both ends to show any directionality between the different points. Although such a standard arrow representation seems intuitive, it can lead to problems in dense graphs that contain many incoming or outgoing relationships. Furthermore, since the arrowheads often have approximately the same size and aspect ratio as the small circles they connect, the graph as a whole might be perceived as cluttered with so much visual detail to the point of being distracting.

via What is the Best Way to Represent Directionality in Network Visualizations? – information aesthetics.

Posts like this make me think that we’re only scratching the surface for Big Data visualization. How many ways can you envision a social network such as a series of cell phone calls? How soon before we transcend the boring lines-and-icons approach?

via World Famous Design Junkies » 1,000 Screens, 1,000 Dreams.

In Gource, software projects are visualized as they break out different branches, and split into different subprojects. Active users fly around zapping each node, representing software updates. The whole visualized node-and-line structure swirls, bends, and bounces like a rubber band.

The best thing about Gourse is the kinetic detail to the visualization, making each structure look like a tree wafting in a breeze.

via YouTube – Gource – Software Version Control Visualization Tool.

There is no way to think up an original and extraordinary design—it can only come as a result of pursuing a given task. In the same way running down a list of words is different from making a narrative.

As FlowingData adds:

This applies to visualization too. When you don’t have a question to answer or a simple wonderment about something, you end up staring at a bunch of numbers with no clue what to do with them. Want to test this out? Go to data.gov and make something useful.

via Visualizing data: ask a question first.

Watch the Growth of Walmart and Sams Club Across America | FlowingData.

Here they break down the dysfunctional Democratic Party:

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what’s on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

Thus, they caucus block us.

The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A ‘Big Tent’ Can Be Too Big « OkTrends.

HeatMapAPI can be used over the Internet or as a .NET DLL that runs in a local environment and allows you to integrate heat map images into Google Maps or other GIS systems.  In this post we’re going to use HeatMapAPI to visualize the density of recent Starbucks store closures.  In a recent statement, Starbucks announced the closure of 600+ stores in the United States due to economic conditions.

In other news, we’d like to thank Starbucks for providing their easily-parsed list of closures. Most visualizations I’ve seen are using this dataset.

via Density Mapping in Google Maps with HeatMapAPI « GeoChalkboard.

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

FloatingSheep.org.

via Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores | FlowingData.

Like Kevin Bacon’s co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.

Introducing News Dots – By Chris Wilson – Slate Magazine.