The Dutch budget for arts & culture is relatively small. The above average cuts will produce below average results.
In 2011 the budget is € 490 million. That sounds like a lot, but it is only a third of what we spend on holidays. It's 1,5% of the annual costs of the State Pension, and only 0,2% of the country's total Budget.
Feel free to use these infographics. Spread the word!

I have prepared dozens of charts & graphs looking at every aspect of global warming that I could. My early Excel based analysis is here. My more recent R based analysis is here. I have used publicly available data sources to reach my own conclusions. I provide the data links and my R script for each chart/ graph so that interested readers can confirm my work for themselves.

Here's a quick summary of my evidence for global warming.

In February 2008, the New York Times published an unusual chart of box office revenues for 7500 movies over 21 years. The chart was based on a similar visualization, developed by the first author, that displayed trends in music listening. This paper describes the design decisions and algorithms behind these graphics, and discusses the reaction on the Web. We suggest that this type of complex layered graph is effective for displaying large data sets to a mass audience. We provide a mathematical analysis of how this layered graph relates to traditional stacked graphs and to techniques such as ThemeRiver, showing how each method is optimizing a different “energy function”. Finally, we discuss techniques for coloring and ordering the layers of such graphs. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the interplay between considerations of aesthetics and legibility.

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans." Matt Woolman Digital Information Graphics Goal VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field. As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.

This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. I designed a set of 20 posters, which contain most of the information. I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.

This website is part of the Master's thesis The Form of Facts and Figures, developed by Christian Behrens in the Interface Design program at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Its goal is the development of a design pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design.

Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age.