If you haven’t “signed up,” please fill this out. We’ll use it to build the aggregation as we figure out who’s where doing what.

Challenge

The world is full of numbers. Your life is full of numbers. Take something that needs clarity, in your head or for others (That’s usually the same for me and often in making something I realize I didn’t understand it quite as well as I’d thought.), and clarify it using the magic of data visualization. Nothing coming to mind? Check out these data visualization challenges.

It helps if you break down your process rather than just posting the final work. Delineate your struggles, what you liked, what you’d like to improve next time, surprises etc. If you’re feeling adventurous tutorials for others following in your footsteps are helpful, remixes of other people’s work, non-standard applications of all kinds are good fun for all. Remember this is done out of joy and for your own sense of fulfillment. Break or bend any rules/guidelines you choose.

To submit your work, just include a link to this post when you publish. We’ll look at doing something more sophisticated in the near future.

Dates

On June 20 from 1:00PM EST to 2:00PM EST we’ll have a synchronous conversation about data visualization in Google +.

We’ll also discuss our next project/topic combination and ways to make the experience better. You can always submit items (that’d be awesome actually) but we’ll be moving on to the next challenge.

Tags

Tags will help us aggregate content from various sources (Twitter, Diigo etc.). The tags for this project are

• #moo
• #dataviz

Add these two tags to your Diigo bookmarks and they’ll show up for other participants on this blog under the diigo category. You can also set a search for them on Twitter or in your Twitter reader of choice so you’ll see other people’s comments.

Basic Information

The following links have pretty good foundational information about data visualization. If you want to add additional examples tag your link in Diigo with #moo, #dataviz, and #basics.

• Not the most thrilling voice over but a good short (2 minutes and 45 seconds) video on data visualization.
• TED Talk on data viz – 18 minutes
• “Like good writing, good graphical displays of data communicate ideas with clarity, precision, and efficiency.” – good and bad examples of data viz over time
• Edward Tufte is one of the people who people who played a major role in this field. He takes some pretty strong stances and tends towards more traditional media options. His website kills me but his books are interesting and his breakdown of the role of PPT in the Challenger disaster is worth reading.

Inspiration

I found the following links to be interesting examples of data visualization. If you want to add additional examples tag your link in Diigo with #moo, #dataviz, and #inspiration.

• Hans Rosling of Gap Minder fame
• Mega Shark Infographic – unfortunately it looks like the source page is hacked but this will take you to my post on it from a while back
• Feltron project – via Dan Meyer from way back in the day
• Quantified Self – Want to see what other people track about themselves? These people are serious.
• The spread of bird flu in Google Earth
• Red Riding Hood Data Visualization Movie
• Census examples

Tools/Tutorials

I found the following to be useful for data visualization. If you want to add additional examples tag your link in Diigo with #moo, #dataviz, and #tools/#tutorial.

• ManyEyes
• Flowing Data has a great set of tutorials/examples and tools. It’s also a good place to look for inspiration.
• For serious data scraping and other games check out Tony Hirst.

If you’re left wanting more, here’s my full set of #dataviz links.