Category: Infographic

Metal bands per 100,000 people, posted by Reddit user Klingerr.

Internet Explorer, I don’t like you. You stunted the growth of the web, and continue to plague me in my development efforts. But apparently some people are beginning to like your new version, as this infographic from Column Five tries, and fails to illustrate. Internet Explorer still sucks, even after MSFT tries to hip it up with cool looking infographics from Column Five, a cool company.

Thanks co-worker Pallas for the link!

Internet Explorer Infographic: The Browser You Loved to Hate – Column Five Media.

Fresh from Buzzfeed, via Animal New York and Bucky Turko, here’s an interactive map of auto accidents – scary to see how many they are, and where they tend to crop up. Stay safe on the roads for the upcoming holiday season!

Today’s infographic is from the Oxford Internet Institute. My own contribution to this project is through my own set of geotagged photos on my Flickr Photostream. Additionally, I did a writeup a while ago on real world field trials of geotagging photos while backpacking in Alaska.

Images are an important form of knowledge that allow us to develop understandings about our world. Flickr is the world’s most used and most popular public repository of photographs and currently hosts over five billion images. This map reveals the global geographic distribution of geotagged images on the platform, and thus reveals the density of visual representations and locally depicted knowledge of all places on our planet.

Data

Each point on the map indicates the total number of geotagged photographs uploaded to Flickr at that location. All geotagged photos were collected through Flickr’s application programming interface (API) using a custom designed program on April 1, 2011. Our program downloaded the count of geotagged photographs in every 0.5 x 0.5 degree latitude-longitude square on the Earth’s surface. Due to the convergence of lines of longitude at the poles, our sampling boxes become larger as they approach the equator.

Findings

As might be expected, the largest concentrations of photographs can be found in some of the world’s most populated places. Much of Western Europe, North America and East Asia are covered by dense layers of virtual representation. However, the density of photographs is not simply a factor of population. Potentials for participation are limited by both censorship of the platform (e.g. in Iran) and the presence of more popular services (e.g. in China). In the rest of the world, the patterns on this map point to images being mostly created by people in the world’s wealthiest and most highly connected regions. The stark contrast in the number of photographs covering Mexico and the United States and the lack of dense clusters of images in the most populated parts of Africa (e.g. coastal West Africa) reinforces this point.

Visualization and analysis by Dr Mark Graham, Scott A. Hale and Monica Stephens in collaboration with Dr Corinne M. Flick and the Convoco Foundation.

This map is taken from the following publication: “Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World’s Knowledge. London, Convoco! Edition.”

Visualizing Data at the Oxford Internet Institute – Mapping Flickr.

This one comes from architecture and design site eVolo, and is by far one of the most outlandish subterranean building ideas I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure which I’d rather live in, this upside down underground building, or one of those decommissioned nuclear missile silos for sale on eBay. Anyway, very interesting infographic…

“The Earthscraper preserves the iconic presence of the Zocalo and the existing hierarchy of the buildings that surround it. It is an inverted pyramid with a central void that allows all habitable spaces to enjoy natural light and ventilation. The first ten stories are dedicated to a pre-Columbian museum. The next ten stories are retail areas and housing while the deeper 35 stories are offices.”

Read the full post on eVolo.

Column Five media consistently produces great infographics, many of which I’ve reblogged on my site.

Their latest kickass data presentation is this video illustrating the power and value of infographics, in motion infographic form. Enjoy!

I post infographics on my blog, a lot. Some are funny, some are informative, but they’re always interesting. Lately I’ve been noticing a bunch of great ones from Column Five Media – they seem to be generating great graphics with good regularity, and often times sending them out to partner websites for distrubution.

Now, Ross Crooks over at Column Five have made a great writeup going over the process of infographics, and some good terminology to know. Be sure to read Crooks’ detailed breakdown of infographics, and check out a few of his examples below.