A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.

Just choose a country and a way to create your map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files (you can even use your zip / postal code column to get the best and most accurate maps!)

This widget lets you display images in a rich interactive visualization similar to that of Apple iTunes known as Cover Flow. It is a Flash-based implementation.

Timeplot is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for plotting time series and overlay time-based events over them (with the same data formats that Timeline supports).

With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details.

Tableau Public is a free service that lets you create and share data visualizations on the web. Thousands use it to share data on websites and blogs and through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Tableau Public allows you to see data efficiently and powerfully without any programming.

Computer generated visualisation, whilst a relatively new subject area has its roots in a long historical tradition of representing information using pictures in ways that combine art, science and statistics. This partial visual history includes the development of maps, astronomy, statistical graphics and computers. Further references and sources are given at the end of this section to enable you to develop your own research.

Infographics and data visualizations are shifting the way people find and experience stories, creating a new way of seeing the world of data. They help communicate complex ideas in a clear, compact and beautiful way, taking deep data and presenting it in visual shorthand. We’ve collected the best examples on the web and gathered them for you to reference, share, and enjoy.

What’s interesting is that over 20 years before sparklines came on the scene, Tufte developed a different type of data visualization that didn’t fare nearly as well. To date, in fact, I’ve only been able to find three examples of it, and even they aren’t completely in line with his vision.

Any time you’d use a line chart to show a progression of univariate data among multiple actors over time, you might have a good candidate for a slopegraph.