The results are not always what you would expect, and are dependent on a good image set from Flickr, but The Color Of is addictive and mesmerizing. Just try it.

The new website CommonTreasure promises to provide a very cool way to visualize the federal budget. You can see the big picture, or drill in by, for example, type of spending, year, or agency.

Google Books is a project to digitize as many books as possible. Though the content in many of the books is copyrighted (particularly in latter titles), the words themselves can be mined/visualized to facilitate research in the Ngrams viewer, basically Google Insights for print. There are a ton of interesting use cases for this, both seeing trends in ideas/concepts and trends in language over time. (And actually, if can be difficult to disaggregate these - as people use more specific terms over time, or language changes over time. And one would like to see a graph of just the amount of words scanned at points in the timeline.  Simple queries can lead to some pretty dramatic conclusions...). Be prepared to get sucked in by this tool. Here's a favorite:

A small but good collection of Ngrams is forming on this tumbleog, and there is a good writeup with nice examples here.

Here she maps and visualizes Kerouac's colors, themes, and structure - check out the  high-res version for full detail.

The structure of Part One of On the Road visualised using a simple tree structure that has been worked with manually in order to give it a more organic feel. Here, Part One divides into chapters, chapters divide into paragraphs, paragraphs divide into sentences, and sentences divide into words. Everything is colour-coded according to key themes in On the Road.

Back in January, Nick posted an infographic of Crayola colors. The designer, in response to viewers interpreting the initial graphic to show that "crayons are becoming too complicated", recently redesigned the infographic. For an interesting study in the subtleties of data visualization, read the full write-up on the exercise over at datapointed.net.  Below is the original graphic, an excerpt about the redesign, and final product.

Yes, the square design looks snappy, but as the colors multiply, they’re forced into ever-narrower slivers of the fixed vertical space – like sardines! Clearly, another choice of layout might have been more flattering...

...Our goal was to maintain the clean geometric aesthetic, while dialing down the “indictment of overzealous product management” and cranking up the “celebration of diversity!” We’d use the same data as before, tweaked slightly per the feedback of historians, who told us that Crayola’s early 16-color boxes tended to include English Vermilion (aka “red orange”) rather than brick red.

Bill Zeller's free Chrome extension graphs trends in your Gmail, using the same functionality as Gmail search. I could spend all day mining for trends in productivity, friendships, and word usage.  Here's a nice example from my inbox:

I just came across the work of Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based artist whose "Running the Numbers" project visualizes statistics from and comments on American life. Jordan's large, detailed prints, made up of smaller images, give a true sense of the quantities he represents. It's worth taking a look through the collection on his site. He includes detail shots which give a nice sense of the composition. Here's a small sample:

Read More...

Really, check it out.

Via Worldchanging.