SpatialKey is a next generation Information Visualization, Mapping, Analysis and Reporting System. It is designed to help organizations quickly assess location based information critical to their organizational goals, decision making processes and reporting requirements.
It looks really good, and I think you can upload your own csv data and have it visualised.
Think it was either Data Mining, or Visual Analytics on LinkedIn that i spotted the link.
this is a great application for facebookm, called Geo Challenge. helps you learn your countries/geography starting off with just the shape and fading in the ajoining/nearby countries to help you realise the paticularly country. they have a round for flags, and cities (usually guessing myself) placing where they are on the world map.
great game and great tool for learning. it helps me with my pathetic knowledge of world geography/cities, although i'm not that bad at flags.
I love this. real triumph to concrete poetry. mallarme or apollinaire would really applaud this visualisation, clean, informative design/map. I agree it works well as a free form poem, (as a western reading, its in english) top left to bottom right with how its composed. I love using type to represent space. type/typography as image. still a sketch... looks good.
'This is the latest map in my "Typography of Place" series... a map of the cities and towns that lie along the Mississippi River. The last two maps I did in this series (Silk Road and the Aleutian Islands) were very horizontal. So I wanted to try one with a vertical format.One of the things I am trying to achieve in these maps is to have the words that make up the map read as a sort of free-form poem.
In this one, I think that comes across particularly strong since you can "read" it from the river's source in the top left to the mouth in the bottom right.I have not color coded the place names on this map as I did in the Aleutian Islands Map but the same theme is present with many towns having Native American names (in addition to the river itself).
French names are also quite present as you travel down the river. Then there is the intriguing sequence of Egyptian-inspired names that includes Memphis, Thebes, Angola, and Cairo.This is still a sketch but I assembled the base map by drawing the river and placing the cities on the appropriate side of the river to try and stay geographically accurate. But I knew as I was building it that I was going to center the towns on the middle of the river to emphasize the meandering path the river takes as it starts in northern Minnesota and works its way all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. '
found here: http://flickr.com/photos/amapple/2546733739/in/set-72157602275753358/
check his blog: http://randomaxis.blogspot.com/2008/06/mississippi-river-typemap-this-is.html
Names Authors
An excellant visualisation taking another fantastic subway (hary beck) subversion visualisation similiar to the web-trend-map-2008-beta by the information architects, except instead of mapping mapping the internet terrain, mapping claude ashcenbrenner's (at serial mapper) blogs/RSS links archive.
He cleverly structures the content of his blogs using the paris subway map layout of lines by renaming them as:
Visualisation
Teaching
Thinkers
Business Intelligence
Missing In Action
Mind Mapping
Network
Creativity
& Humour
To arrange all these blogs into an easy to follow, complex/diverse/similarities content ordered, clean spatial structure is a real achievement. It has this easy to the eye pink background and beige centre that allows the Blue and Green names easy to focus on and follow along the lines. But if it isnt enough of an achivement to arrnage these complex/diverse blogs in a great connectivist structure, he still added further depth by simply subtly differentiating between French & English blogs without having to compomise his overall layout much at all merely a small key to say:
green - english
blue - french
Making it bilingual to help when navigating.
He was exporting this to pdf so that it is a fully interactive hyperlinks attached to the blog name nodes concept map. make in more engaging yet further.
He breaks it into 2 output version of the authors and one for the names, both using the same spatial location along his different lines so as to easily correlate the authors with their blogs.
I love it as you can probably guess.
Here are cluade's comments (forgive translation, may not be absolutely correct)
'You've probably noticed this blog is somewhat artistic. Indeed unlike the practice you can not find the list of my favorite blogs.In fact I think for a long time, but procrastination also achieved all that we must say that I was not sure how to keep all my RSS feeds in a reasonable space ..
I finally found the solution obviously in the form of a map. You will therefore find below a selection of 70 blogs devoted to mapping information encapsulated in a subway map.
Parisians (and others - °) recognize a part of the metropolitan network to which were added some tram lines. This plan is bilingual French / English including heads of line that I let you discover ... The francophone (in Blue) is represented by nearly 40 blogs, many of which have emerged in the last year ..
This device is designed to encourage you to leave your usual lines by taking paths through it.
Ca n'al'air nothing but a path we must remember that the term method has been built from a Greek word meaning old way .... So Good cognitive walk!
Each blog is associated a subway station. Place your mouse URL appears, click will open a new window to view the blog.'
Love his concept of 'leaving usual lines by taking paths through it', much like my work with the recent http://visualthinkmap.blogspot.com/2008/09/notebook-route-map.html. Could be called Blog Route Visualisation, but Blog Subway Map infer's that quite effectively.
Aa soon as I spot I know a link to Claude's interactive version, trust i will repost this. Great aid to exploring blogs of similiar content/interests/terrain that can be used in an instant, just how you more often then not want a visualisation's performance (function) to do.
Fantastic claude
Enjoy the journey
from here: http://www.serialmapper.com/archive/2008/09/25/mise-en-seine-de-blogs.html
search the web for the titles/authors of blogs, will no doubt bring up the right one as we await pdf concept map
This is showing the visual communication of my thoughts on page(s), (9 pages). A visualisation through the journey of my investigation on the terrain of thoughts.
They meander accross the double page spread and mostly are connected via their physical position, i.e. a train of thought finishes, it restarts at the same point at the edge of the page on the next.
They were experiments to see how I visualised my ideas. Whether their physical arrangement through the notebook of my research, ideas, investigations helped me understand better. Re-Re-Reinvestigation.
The second image (route map) is for others to use, simply overlay it on any terrain thou wishes squire, your own notebook pages, maps etc. Then visually think and elicit thoust own topographic connections and routes.
It is quite a conceptual abstract notion to take the visual direction of my thoughts on page(s), the journey of my investigation on the terrain of thoughts and utilise this route with alternative content/terrain. Really like the abstract/organic lines mixed with geometric shapes bringing a bit of order to my thoughts (chaos).
Some experiments I have created, playing with that great notion of 'the map is not the territory' - baudrillard. Hence investigations into what is the territory, and can you utilise maps in different territories. Spatial arrangments intensifying/enhancing cognition. Got me buzzing.
Hope they're interesting.
The creative commons - attribution - non commercial - share alike
Measured Perspiration by Kanarinka.
These colourful, fluid lines & abstract series of drawings map an extroadinary terrain, visualising the 12 inches of weather on the human body by tracing perspiration, movement and time.
define:weather says: Weather is the specific condition of the atmosphere at a particular place and time.
Kanarinka states, 'It is measured in terms of such things as wind, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, cloudiness, and precipitation.
Weather is everyday and everywhere. For this project, I launched an artistic investigation by asking the question “Can a body (human, not planetary) have weather, too?”.
To create the drawings for 12 Inches of Weather, I used paper to collect the sweat on twelve inches of my body during running outdoors in hot weather. Then, using an algorithm (a simple system), I hand-traced the contours of that sweat onto 1970’s computer paper using various colors of felt tip pen.
The algorithm would tell me how many minutes to spend tracing each color' Kanarinka
Very interesting project, curious as to what the algorithm was defining the time length but still very creative.
featured here: http://visualthinkmap.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=2168552%3APhoto%3A1662
Note that I dont have an obsession with New York at the moment, but with such great art foundations of Rauschenberg, DeKooning & Pollock its no surprise of its creative vein. Today technology is the key that has fused creativity & opened boundaries to allow interdisciplinary practice.
The New York Times real estate magazine Key started with the cover design concept of hiring people that are brilliant to do personal interpretations of what a key means to them & their lives. The 1st cover in the Fall 2006 by Carin Goldberg featured all the places she lived at using the font Dynamoe (green & black thumbnail) & spring 2007 (yellow & purple thumbnail) was designed by new york design studio 2x4.
In dialogue with John Maeda (author of Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation) art director Dick Barnett looked at some of Maeda's sketches and replied to him saying how he's 'loving #3 Google Mappish Mondrian' (3rd thumbnail along) idea and how he might 'think of a way to make it more personal to [maeda's] life'. Maeda responded utilising Boston, he states how he 'thinks of the world as a sort of map of cities', a topographic territory, he 'mined the internet for all the cities with an airport' & made a simple diagram and then drew some 'fluid like curves [framing] to connect into the centre of the keyhole' (4th thumbnail), (Centaur Publication, 2007, p. nov – 42).
Maeda wanted to concentrate on the background rather than the foreground & after some design processing (problem solving) such as replacing fonts used to that of Key magazines T-Star, it was finished. The design is brilliant, although probably not that easy a task to create without access/stroke knowledge of computer science functionality but excellant aesthetics. The overall white stands out from the blue (a colour normally percieved as depiciting sea in maps) causing a slight incongruity on part of the viewer, map reader/user. Boston being the epicentre of travel in this map providing the key access to other cities and the viral red linking lines spidering the topgraphic locations.
Excellant Map utilising technology to visualise data functionality mentioned upon with Bradford Paley, in the heart of its design.
'John Maeda is an artist and a computer scientist, and he views the computer not as a substitute for brush and paint but as an artistic medium in its own right. His mission is to foster the growth of what he calls 'humanist technologists'- people that are capable of articulating future culture through informed understanding of the technologies they use' (http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/maeda.html, 2008, p. john maeda interview).
More examples of the stages of Maeda's Key Cover design here, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/06/realestate/keymagazine/20070909_KEY_COV_SS_index.html
Creative Review. New York. Centaur Publication, 2007, p. nov – 42).