Visualmotive Blog

A tool to map your Twitter followers. Tweemap shows up to 10,000 followers for any given user. The Google Maps Javascript API provides core mapping utilities, and the Twittervision API was used for geocoding.

Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The first section, “Pulses” is visualized above using custom Python scripts. Analysis of the music is provided by the Echo Nest API. [audio:http://www.digischool.nl/ckv1/studiew/dubbelgangers/reich/reich.mp3|loader=0x9900ff] See also, Song Visualizations with Echo Nest.

We find the work of Jason Salavon highly inspirational. At the intersection of art and visualization, his images are distinctive for their surface and immediate graphical language while also communicating significant stories of process and history. By merging dozens or hundreds images that share some common theme, Salavon helps us extract high-level information about common [...]

The visual components of a subway map make it a great metaphor for grouping and linking ideas or things across many different conceptual realms. We’ve collected here ten excellent examples of the subway map metaphor. 1. Milky Way The Milky Way Transit Authority shows the spiral of the galaxy, with major constellations and nebula appearing [...]

We recently came across Anita Lillie’s beautiful music visualization and MusicBox projects. The music visualization project was especially intriguing to us, since it was the only music visualization project we’d seen that did not require video playback—the visualizations were strictly in 2D. Unfortunately, the source code for Lillie’s visualizations was not available, so we decided [...]

Jonathan Stott’s thesis Automatic Layout of Metro Maps Using Multicriteria Optimisation (PDF) is a comprehensive look at the state-of-the-art of automatic transit map generation. The premise: start with a geographic map of subway or transit stations and lines, then convert this map into an abstract yet informative representation of the transit system akin to those [...]

Following up on our earlier post about the Tokyo subway map, the Information Architects Web Trends Startpage is a clever mashup of the subway map metaphor with the standard start-page. Authors of this map have manually categorized and located some of the web’s most popular sites into color-coded lines and stations. Especially interesting is the [...]

Christopher Healey and his research team have developed a painterly approach to data visualization. His software correlates dimensions of multivariate data to dimensions of visual sensation. The results are stunning and have both artistic and scientific merit. In the images shown here, Healey’s software has been turned to the task of visualizing data from the [...]

We are impressed especially by the delicacy of movement and interaction these robots must possess. See more pictures.

The Feltron Annual Reports are brilliant personal visualizations that describe, one year at a time, the life of Nicholas Felton. He uses an elegant combination of textual manipulation, charts, and diagrams to convey interesting and sometimes trivial facts about his life. We learn that the subway fees are 93 cents on the mile, compared with [...]