Visualizing Everything Facebook Knows about You

A couple of months ago, 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems requested Facebook for all his personal data. The European arm of Facebook, based in Dublin, Ireland, was obliged to turn over this information, as they had to follow an European law that requires any entity to provide full access to data about an individual, should this individual personally request for it. Accordingly, Max received a CD containing about 1,222 pages (PDF files), including chats he had deleted more than a year ago, "pokes" dating back to 2008, invitations, and hundreds of other details. Berlin-based newspaper taz.de decided to visualize [taz.de] different aspects of this data: the magnitude of the 1.222 unique pages, the exact times Max logged in and wrote messages, the times of day messages he sent or received, Max's friend network, the locations of the pictures he took in Vienna, and the most popular tags of Max's messages. While the visualizations by themselves might not stand out, they do reveal the huge amou! nt of digital traces one leaves, even when they were originally purposively 'deleted' or discarded. In addition, this event has triggered a wider initiative called Europe versus Facebook, which aims for more transparency and control of personal Facebook data. By the way, how can you get access to your own data? Facebook has made it increasingly difficult to do so. What was previously a simple online form, must now happen via email or snail mail. All the instructions can be found here.

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Revealing How Unsubstantiated Rumors Spread via Twitter

Based on a scientific analysis of more than 2.6 million tweets, UK newspaper The Guardian presents "Riot Rumours" [guardian.co.uk]. The online visualization aims to explore how various false rumors in regards to the riots came to be: for instance, at some point in time, it was believed the London Eye was set on fire, the army was deployed, and that some rioters took over a local McDonalds to cook some food. Each bubble represents a unique tweet, of which the surface area corresponds to the influence of its author, i.e. the amount of followers he or she has. The color of a bubble has a qualitative value, that is whether the content of the tweet was in 'support' or in 'opposition' of the specific rumor, or was just a neutral comment. The color brightness corresponds to the relative time since the tweet was posted. An interactive timeline allows for animating the bubble graph to investigate how various rumors were started, supported, and then denied via the Twitter medium. Interestingly, Bryan Connor over at the The Why Axis, already posted an interesting design review of this very visualization. See also "Twitter Traffic during the Riots", also by The Guardian Interactive.

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Neighborhood Scoreboards: Exposing Energy Consumption in the Street

Neighborhood Scoreboards [neighbourhoodscoreboards.com] aims to include some healthy social competition in the monitoring of household energy consumption. Instead of keeping energy monitors private and within the confines of the family living room, Neighborhood Scoreboards exposed the energy consumption of several households on the facade of the respective houses, for everyone to see. Equipped with only a limited financial budget and the wish to keep a self-imposed requirement to develop a 'public display' that is itself sustainable, robust but cheap, it became rapidly clear that an electronic 'screen' was not feasible. Instead, the project chose to use a light-weight, weather-resistant board material that was fully recyclable, conveyed the visual aesthetic of chalkboard, and could be regularly updated. Accordingly, a set of 5 boards were mounted on different neighboring houses in a Sydney suburb. Each board featured distinct information graphics to divulge the household's energy consumption performance, and included several persuasive mechanisms to encourage positive behavior changes. For a period of more than 7 weeks, the researchers went through the painstaking work of manually updating each of these displays, with the help of a set of commercial energy usage monitors, some pens with liquid chalk, and of course, a long, strong ladder. The design of the chalkboard consisted of 5 distinct parts: an historical timeline showing relative changes in energy usage (a graph which became overdrawn in different color each week), a simple ranking score revealing one's performance versus those of others, a numerical readout showing exactly one's daily change in energy consumption in terms of percentage (to be able to compare different kinds of households fairly), and a daily 'smiley' reward that became increasingly positive if low energy consumption behavior was sustained over a longer period of time. Subsequently, the researchers performed a small, 7-week in-situ investigation to compare the energy consumption behavior of people with such a public display against those without, while all living in the same neighborhood. The preliminary results of this exploratory case study can be discovered here (PDF). Disclaimer: Together with several other valuable contributors, the author of this blog was very closely involved in this project, while working at his previous employer, the University of Sydney. We are also looking for opportunities to develop this concept further.

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Amanda Cox Talks about Developing Infographics at the New York Times

We know that The New York Times graphics department produces some of the best visualizations in the world. We have seen its director, Steve Duenes, give a talk about some of their best works and provide some answers on their internal approach. Who I had not seen talk before, however, is Amanda Cox, whose name is often featured on quite some innovative works, such as the voronoi treemap showing the Consumer Price Index, the interactive timeline revealing Michael Jackson's career statistics, the streamgraphs that map how people spend their day, or the dense yet intuitive line graphs that unravel the potential socio-demographic drivers of the unemployment in the US. In the small collection of (4 different) videos you can watch below, Amanda shares some of the lessons the group has learned along the way, particularly on how to integrate real interactivity with storytelling, and how to strike a balance between clarity and creating a sense of wonder. For those more interested in the implementation side of online infographics development, two videos show Amanda discuss how the NYTimes uses the program R as an exploratory tool for professional data visualization. Via Visual Journalism and R Bloggers. Image taken from Nordiske Mediedager at Flickr.

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New Math: Using Mathematical Equations to Describe the World

The following website seems to have been around since many years, yet it was new to me. The idea behind New Math [morenewmath.com] is very simple, though its execution consistent and intriguing: to capture everyday concepts solely through the language of mathematical equations. Artist Craig Damrauer originally started the New Math series for a solo show in New York City in 2002. Since then it, these equations have been released as a book, as postcards and as prints. If you want to see all entries at once, check here.

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Follow the Hash Tag: A Dynamic Bubble Graph of Twitter Trends

Follow the Hash Tag [followthehashtag.com] by Madrid-based communication design office DNOiSE is a viral advertising tool, but also a live visualization of popular Tweet topics. The visualization can be filtered for specific keywords, retweets or even unique Twitter users, including several other parameters (such as the minimum or maximum number of times a user needs to mention the keyword to be selected). The result then becomes a large clickable bubble graph accompanied with several Twitter frequency statistics, in which each user is being represented as a unique bubble of which the size depends on the number of appropriate tweets. These bubbles can be further explored to discover the usernames, profiles and their messages. Generate: Performs the search in question or updating the parameters we have published.

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German Energy Landscape: Where and How Is Its Energy Created?

The German Energy Landscape [geblogs.com], designed by Gregor Aisch, reveals some important facts and statistics about the German energy generation and consumption. Germany is one of the frontrunners regarding energy generation, having recently decided to close down all its nuclear reactors, in order to further emphasize the development of renewable sources, such as solar, wind, biomass, water, and geothermal power. The interactive graphs show Germany's different energy sources (such as oil, gas, and renewables), energy resource dependence (e.g. whether these resources originate from within the country, or from somewhere else), and predicted energy mix (how the sources will change in the next 40 years according to 3 different and independent organizations). The visualization makes use of the so-called streamgraph technique, originally invented as ThemeRiver, which was probably best popularized by the NYTimes movie revenue infographic back in 2008. The technique was also used to represent music listening habits (later also called WaveGraphs), Tokyo living statistics and news memes. Interestingly, Gregor made available all the source code to create such StreamGraphs in Actionscript here. It's original Processing version can be downloaded here.

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