Top 10 Information Visualizations on the Web

Having scoured the internet for interesting visualizations I've accumulated a bunch of bookmarks. I thought I'd share some of my favourites. Enjoy!

Oh, and if you've seen other cool visualizations, don't hesitate to drop a comment.

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10. Many Eyes

This website, created by the Visual Communications Lab at IBM, allows anyone to create information visualizations. Once you register, you can upload data, choose a visualization, and start exploring. Users have already created many interesting examples and you don't have to register to see them.

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9. Newsmap

The Newsmap at Marumushi is an example of a treemap visualization. This one shows news headlines collected from the Google News news aggregator. The size of the squares indicates the number of related articles and the square's brightness shows the article's age. The goal of this visualization is to show the media's preferential coverage of news topics.

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8. Ruben's Tube Sound Visualization

Okay, this one is mostly just for fun, but I wanted to include a visualization that wasn't generated using a computer. Plus, this visualization has fire! Check out the video after the link.

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7. Visual Thesaurus

Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus is a radial tree interface where the nodes are words and the edges connect synonyms. The force-directed layout and 3D implementation make for a stunning user experience, especially when you consider this website has been around since 1998.

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6. Flight Patterns

Here is an example of beautiful visualizations that can be produced using the popular Processing programming environment. Aaron Koblin has created several different movies using data from the FAA. The visualizations show flights as glowing dots on a black background and it's interesting to see how the geography becomes visible as more flight paths are drawn.

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5. Flickr Related tag browser

There are a lot of websites that collect tag data from their users, including the photo-sharing site, Flickr. There have also been a lot of interfaces built to allow users to explore these tag spaces as graphs. This particular one is a very slick radial tree and it provides a great way to surf the images on Flickr.

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4. Digg Visualizations

Digg Labs has a handful of interesting visualizations of the data collected by the Digg website. They're very clean and well done but the best part is that the data appears in real time (or close to it). This is really only possible with a huge website like Digg where new data (diggs, submissions) is being created all the time.

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3. Music Listening Habits

Lee Byron created this great visualization of a person's music-listening habits over time. The data is pulled from Last.fm and presented in a way that shows when Lee first started listening to each artist, as well as how much he listens to them. In this image, time increases from left to right. Each band of colour represents a particular artist: a wider band indicates that Lee listened to that artist more. The bands of colour for artists that Lee just started listening are coloured green and slowly fade to the blue of the artists he's been listening to for a long time.

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2. Clusterball – Visualizations of Wikipedia

Chris Harrison's Clusterball exposes the structure of the article categories in Wikipedia. It's another graph visualization, with a single node at the center of a circle, its neighbours placed within the ball, and their neighbours along the edge of the ball. Lines are drawn between categories and pages that link to each other, and their lengths are minimized. This process clusters related categories and pages together, hopefully exposing patterns in the way humans organize information.

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1. We Feel Fine

This project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar offers several different visualizations of a rather unique dataset: sentences containing the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" pulled from blog posts. It's a large-scale exploration of human feeling—definitely worth a look. Be sure to click the links in the lower-left corner to see other views of the data.

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For more graph visualization goodness, check out my Constellation project.