What are the relations between digital cartography and hand-drawn maps?
The science is dividing the field of knowledge into disposable knowledge and reusable knowledge. Google maps are falling into the first category, while axonometric maps belong to the second, because they're suitable for being reused. An 11-year-old hand-drawn map still looks beautiful, whereas 11 years from now Google maps will be dated. Google and others are failing to present the beautifulness of our planet to us when doing their digital atlases.

Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes.
Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

Reparieren leicht gemacht (1972), Verlag Das Beste, Stuttgart, 23 x 26 cm, 568 pp
Do you think the actual possibility of processing big datasets will affect other fields of visual design beyond data representation?
The digital has had a great impact not only on the production of information, but also on how to get to the sources. But this speed comes at a cost that shouldn't be underestimated, and that cost is precision. In the early days, information designers controlled the entire process and physically possessed the information. Nowadays, if you're doing a data visualisation using bytes that aren't on your hard drive, or that you don't even own, then you're dependent on other people. That's the digital drawback. The moment authoritarian countries decide to cut the wires, all the knowledge will be gone.

Yay:<br />
"Bloom Studio Inc. today announced the closing of a seed round of funding led by Betaworks with participation from SV Angel. Additional investors include Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr. The terms of the financing were not disclosed.<br />
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...<br />
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Bloom is rolling out a series of engaging and playful applications on iOS and web platforms that make social media and streaming media datasets easier to explore and understand. Their first applications will be available in the iOS app store later this quarter."

"We're excited to invite you in to our newly redesigned site at bloom.io, where we'll be showcasing the first instances of the experiences we're designing, starting with Fizz and Cartagram. What is important to realize about these, as with all of our coming applications, is that they are the foundations of a constant flow of ongoing iterative development, much like video game franchises. As a participant in the Bloom Network, you'll be presented with an ever-changing, ever-increasing variety of views onto the world's most popular web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, youTube, Netflix, Dropbox, Instagram, and so forth. Some of these instruments will be lyrical, some playful, some analytic, many of them combinations of all three, but all will provide compelling and engaging handles on the information that matters to you most, each one evolving and improving over time, building on your understanding of its performance."

"We analyzed and visualized Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions in the English Wikipedia. The visualization above represents the 100 longest discussions that resulted in the deletion of the respective article. AfD discussions are represented by a thread starting at the bottom center. Each time a user joins an AfD discussion and recommends to keep, merge, or redirect the article a green segment leaning towards the left is added. Each time a user recommends to delete the article a red segment leaning towards the right is added. As the discussion progresses, the length of the segments as well as the angle slowly decay."

"Another interesting point is that the core map based on human interactions divides Great Britain into approximately the number of 'official' Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) British regions - with boundaries that approximately coincide with the traditional ones. Many of the telecom regions - those corresponding to Scotland, South West, London and the East of England - closely match the forms of historically and administratively important regions. In fact, on average about 80% of pixels fall within a corresponding telecom region. While not surprising, this finding seems to corroborate our method: we would indeed expect an agreement between the administrative boundaries and those found from human interaction, as they probably evolved together, over many centuries of mutual interplay - cohesive patterns within society promoting change in administrative boundaries and the latter, in turn, affecting human interaction."

"Visual Backchannel is a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events using interactive visualizations. Microblogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during political speeches, sport competitions, natural disasters, and other large events. Currently, shared updates are typically displayed in the form of a simple list, making it difficult to get an overview of the fast-paced discussions as it happens in the moment and how it evolves over time. In contrast, our Visual Backchannel design provides an evolving, interactive, and multi-faceted visual overview of large-scale ongoing conversations on Twitter."

"Conclusion: The story is correct. The Jimmy-appeal is a lot more effective than the text-based ads. But the visualization is not showing why and how.
So why do I rant so heavily about a harmless piece of visualization then? Why don't I mind my own business and let David McCandless mind his?
Well, I just gave a presentation for the Danish Union of Journalists, telling them that the current boom in infographics - beautiful infographics too - has one major flaw: They're apparently not rooted in a passion for telling the true story - the research too often isn't good enough."

Or thamestide.com. James Bridle's single-pixel-equivalent status display for the current tide level of the Thames. I had no idea it had such an enormous range - 20+ feet!

Laser-cut pixel art showing deforestations of countries incl. Pakistan, Mexico, and others.

Tom Insam:
"The idea is to extend Hammond's favcol thing to shapefiles. I want a map of the world where every shapefile is drawn in the 'dominant' colour for that shape - I'm currently doing this by fetching the 20 most Interesting photos for a given shape and averaging out the colours, though clearly I'm going to need a more exciting algorithm for this to avoid a boring grey map. What I'm _hoping_ for is that cities will be grey and countryside will be green and there might even be bits of blue if there's a lot of sea or something."

By Brian Suda, foreword by Jeremy Keith:
"There is a new vernacular emerging in the realms of data representations, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the much simpler origins and best practices of charts and graphs.

Brian Suda takes you on a journey through the basics and makes it easy to produce beautiful looking, accurate representations of data. He'll walk you through how to visualize and design data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing."

"In this classic mix of puppetry and animation, Harry demonstrates the art of Visual Thinking to Kermit; and what it does to you once it gets out of control.

This is one of the most well known Sam and Friends scenes that shows up in most documentaries. A clip was shown on The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years, revealing it to have been from 1959. A later version of this skit was performed in 1966 on The Ed Sullivan Show, with Kermit as the hipster and Grump as the straight man. Finally, a 1971 Sesame Street sketch featured a similar scene about shapes."

"Plotter is an open-source tool for designers to map their data into the real world. Plotter asks the you - the designer - to define that connection between data and visual presentation before making anything. In other words, whatever else you make with Plotter, you'll be making a map.

The system is designed so that in theory you could map anything you wanted - buildings, animals, or conceptual frameworks."

"This web site contains links to demos shown during the SVG Wow! session at the SVG Open 2009 conference. The purpose of the SVG Wow session is to demonstrate features of the SVG format in either pure rendering, interactivity, animation, or integration with HTML. Some of the demos are also meant to demonstrate advanced, upcoming features. Below is a list of the demos that were prepared for the 2009 edition of the conference session."

Quick, wonderful little musical visualization.

"One of The Times' recent graphics, 'A Peek Into Netflix Queues,' ended up being one of our more popular graphics of the past few months. Since then, there have been a few questions about the how the graphic was made and Tyson Evans, a friend and colleague, thought it might interest SND members.

...

We decided to focus on cities, rather than the nation as a whole, for a few reasons.

...

Matthew Bloch's mapping framework is highly optimized, but it's not necessarily equipped to handle changing 35,000+ polygons between 100 different movies as fast as would be necessary - no one likes to use a scrubber that's slow to react.

...

So, we decided on a dozen cities, determined mostly by population but also geographic distribution, which is why Minneapolis, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco are on the map, but not Houston or Philadelphia."

"In this paper we report about the Urban Systems Framework (USF) that was developed within the Digital Phoenix project at Arizona State University. Digital Phoenix is an effort to create a planning tool that allows keen insight into urban dynamics in the Phoenix metropolitan area through the use of state-of-art visualization, simulation, and GIS tools, combined with detailed social, economic and environmental data. These goals are only achievable in a collaborative interdisciplinary research approach. This approach led to several technological challenges during the course of the research:

1) Storage and organization of the data that researchers and collaborators need for their work,
2) Automation of data processing, conversion, and automated execution of simulations,
3) Interoperability for collaboration and distribution of result sets."

Interesting but surprisingly disingenuous BBC News article from David McCandless, identifying a short-term trend in a much bigger picture to sell his new book. Reminds of when John Maeda took personal credit for animated graphics on the internet.

"Serious information used to be relayed in words, graphs and charts - pictures were just pretty window dressing. That's all changing, says David McCandless.
E-mails. News. Facebook. Wikipedia. Do you ever feel there's just too much information? Do you struggle to keep up with important issues, subject and ideas? Are you drowning in data?
In this age of information overload, a new solution is emerging that could help us cope with the oceans of data surrounding and swamping us. It's called information visualisation."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
"The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication.

...

Roy can't communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he's not alone in his obsession. Another character - Gillian Guiler - is also obsessed with Devil's Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil's Tower aware that it's the location for the alien spaceship's landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian's. 'You should try sculpture next time', he deadpans."

BERG:
"In one of our brainstorms, where we were discussing ways to visualise a school's performance - Webb blurted 'Chernoff Schools!!!' – and we all looked at each other with a grin.

Chernoff Schools!!! Awesome.

Matt Brown immediately started producing some really lovely sketches based on the rough concept, imagining how an array of schools with different performance attributes might look like, whether they could appear in isometric 3D on maps or other contexts, and how they might be practically used in some kind of comparison table.

...

It's as much a logo, a mascot and an endearing, ownable emblem as it is a useful visualisation."

From Infosthetics, this moves nicely: "'The Cost of Getting Sick' is a a new data visualization tool developed in collaboration with Ben Fry, Director of Seed Visualization, which enables the exploration of some the 6 million patient records currently stored in GE's proprietary electronic medical records database."

"What if pixels were part of a computer-driven color economy? What if they could freely trade their color with pixels of other colors? Jer Thorp's Colour Economy imagines an artificial economy of pixels, in which individual 'traders' exchange colors as a currency or commodity. While Jer's depictions show an evolution process between the trading pixels, we wanted to offer a macro-economic, snap-shot perspective where we visualize pixels as part of a nation and within each nation, being part of a state"

NYTimes interactive graphic. For people like me (white men age 25-44 with college degree) it's a rosy 3.9% unemp. rate. The highest is for black men age 15-24 with no high school, at an absolutely mind-boggling 48.5%.

calendarHeat, R plugin for generating daily heatmaps of a data stream secondarily organized by week and year.

Another one of these, from Poly9:
"Import your data, geocode it, share it with coworkers and friends, create thematic maps, create interactive applications.

mapspread is a platform that lets non-programmers create and maintain interactive maps with their own data. No database needed, no setup cost, no overly complex GIS. IT department is optional."

Thematic mapping for Google Maps - uses Raphael JS and the Google Maps API to do few basic cartography tricks: choropleths, dot plots, etc.

"I've recently been doing a bit of research on real-time, data-driven timelines. Here are a few of the solutions that generally fall into the news/search results category. These are less visual and more functional, but that's what I was after in this case..."

New touch video from Timo and Jack.
"It became quite clear early that both the magic and the problem of the technology was that you can't see it."
Jack is in full David Lynch mode here.

"Cartography 2.0 is a free online knowledge base and e-textbook for students and professionals interested in interactive and animated maps. I (Mark) pitched the idea to my co-authors because I knew that, as teachers, we were all frustrated with the inability of traditional textbooks to keep pace with Web technologies. Nor could we find any comprehensive online resources that provided the same breadth and depth we've come to expect from a professionally produced textbook. The kind of knowledge that is needed to make dynamic maps spans many (traditionally separate) fields and we set-out to answer a basic question we've been asked many times: what's the important stuff I need to know about making great on-demand/interactive maps?"

Shan Carter and Karl Russell illustrate changes in the market cap of the finance industry with a swimmy, animated treemap. Hypnotic, playful. Very good.

Not really digging the combative stance here, but otherwise looks promising:

"To me, information aesthetic visualisation cannot be interpreted the same way as we have always read infovis; and yet it seems like people still want to fit it into that box, and try and tether it to an important, but distant ancestor.

The Outliers is here to:

1) Fight on our own territory.
2) Put a female visualisation blogger in the mix.
3) Have someone stuff and explain it.
4) Reduce the information load, not increase it.
5) Challenge the accepted norms."

"tldr is an application for navigating through large-scale online discussions. The application visualizes structures and patterns within ongoing conversations to let the user browse to content of most interest. In addition to visual overviews, it also incorporates features such as thread summarization, non-linear navigation, multi-dimensional filtering, and various other features that improve the experience of participating in large-discussions.

The current version of the application is functional for discussions on Reddit."

Purdue University Regional Visualization and Analytics Center:
"We are developing visual analytic environments for the communication of information and insight from massive, disparate, incomplete, and time-evolving homeland security data sets. Our environments are comprehensive, providing analytic capabilities that enable the entire process from receiving massive raw data, to the integration and extraction of relevant data necessary for the information analysis task, to the integrated visual presentation and analysis environment for evidence-based planning, decision making, and response.

In developing this environment, PURVAC focuses on three important and representative homeland security challenges that can benefit from systematic analysis of massive data: emergency planning and response, mobile analytics, and healthcare management and monitoring."

"We are dedicated to design & development of Rich Internet Applications for biodiversity information.

We are experts on user Interaction and visualization of large taxonomic, geospatial and temporal datasets. We work with our clients to deliver engaging data visualizations and advanced geographic information systems."

"I've been thinking a lot recently about the growing popularity and potential of interactive data visualizations as feedback mechanisms on the world around us. Over the past few weeks, I've had the pleasure of talking with Stamen Design's Tom Carden and Dopplr's Boris Anthony, two talented designers who are both well-steeped in the information visualization space, about why we're starting to see more of them and where they see it all going."

"A few nights ago the talented folks at Stamen Design hosted us at their studios for our second dataviz salon in San Francisco. Four talks were given which I’ll mention out of order:
1) Stamen: Data Reaching Through Maps
2) Protovis: An Open Source Grammar of Graphics
3) A Mathematician’s View: A Visualization is a Hypothesis
4) UUorld: Multidimensional Extrusion Maps."

Tim Malbon: "Data. It's the word on everyone's lips and- err fingertips. Yes, we all dream about getting our hands dirty with data nowadays. I've read a number of excellent blog posts and seen some killer presentations on the subject over the past few days and I thought I'd share."

Berlin-based artist, works with data, sculpture and code.

"More and more, though, some reporters are using data visualization tools to find the story hidden in the data. Those tools help them discover patterns and focus their reporting on particular places and times. Many of the presentations, which can have rough interfaces or less-than-sleek design, are never published."

"Today, we're taking the next step in reader involvement with the launch of The New York Times Visualization Lab, which allows readers to create compelling interactive charts, graphs, maps and other types of graphical presentations from data made available by Times editors. NYTimes.com readers can comment on the visualizations, share them with others in the form of widgets and images, and create topic hubs where people can collect visualizations and discuss specific subjects."

"Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots. These primitives are called marks, and each mark encodes data visually through dynamic properties such as color and position."

Infosthetics contest winners, including some excellent map-based work, all made of paper.

Robert Kosara asks everyone to get off his lawn.

"We're proud to introduce you to a small project we've developed in the past weeks: MM Construct. MM Construct is a base application for any Flash AS3 project that uses the excellent ModestMaps library. We strive to help you get up and running quickly with your own visualization projects."

Tom Carden lists three things he's excited about for this year:
1) Realtime messaging and XMPP,
2) Custom cartography and up-to-date maps,
3) Visualisation and vector mapping in a web-browser using NotFlash technologies.

Me too.

"An animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data."

Graphical view of live network traffic made with Prefuse Toolkit and accompanied by piano.

"This group is for sharing visualizations of web operations metrics. For the most part, this means graphs of systems and application metrics, from software like ganglia, cacti, hyperic, etc."

Animated, slider-driven histories of OSM coverage in various places.