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!)

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.

In the beginning of the 20th century, London was by far the largest city on earth. Back then, it was the only city to have more than five million inhabitants and is therefore the first so-called megacity. Now, over a century later, there are 63 megacities worldwide. The agglomeration of Tokyo, Kawasaki and Saitama is the biggest megacity of all of them, with the astonishing number of 34 million inhabitants. It is clear where this is heading: the 21st century will be the era of mega-metropolises.

Here are all the albums reviewed by Pitchfork in 2010. Explore albums by hovering over the album art or using the search bar. Click the filters to see only the year's best music. When you find an album you like, click to open the review. Enjoy the year in reviews.

I just wrapped up a final project for an aesthetics course this semester, the assignment being to create a “Database of the Self.” I chose to make the database as a representation of the roles we play in terms of how we interact with information online. The roles are overlaid on a panarchy, which shows a visualization of adaptive lifecycles. Though the evolution of every idea or meme won’t necessarily follow this specific path, (it may in fact be rhizomatic, with multiple feedback loops), this begins to flesh out what we become as nodes within an enmeshed series of networks.

The cycle can be thought to begin with the “Activators,” in the lower right side of image.