Simon Willison’s Weblog

Facets. New open source visualization and data exploration tool from Google (“Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product”, whatever that means). It’s intended for visualizing machine learning datasets but it’s obviously useful outside of ML as well—any time you need to understand a large dataset this looks like it could be extremely useful. Ships with example jupyter notebooks and an easy mechanism for embedding the Facets interactive UI directly inside a notebook cell.

# 8th October 2017, 12:21 am / facetedsearch, visualisation, google, jupyter

The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic. A database dump from Netflix, some clever hackery in ArcView GIS, hpricot to scrape Metacritic and a lot of careful thought about the UI for navigating the data.

# 25th January 2010, 1:11 pm / ui, design, usability, netflix, new-york-times, infographics, visualisation, arcview, gis, hpricot, metacritic

russell davies: datadecs. Personalised christmas decorations made from data from Twitter, Doppler, last.fm and Flickr. The Twitter snowman came from a 3D printer—the size of the head varies depending on your number of followers. Best of all though is the Flickr decoration which represents the apertures you’ve used over the past year.

# 7th January 2010, 9:58 pm / visualisation, datadecs, russell-davies, flickr, twitter, dopplr, lastfm, 3dprinters

last.fm for television. Dale Lane’s neat hack to visualise his television watching habits. An Ubuntu / vdx home theatre stores TV events in SQLite, and graphs are generated using Python and Open Flash Chart 2. The really clever bit: the back-end captures nearby bluetooth IDs’ allowing events to be filtered by the people watching based on the presence of their mobile phones.

# 7th January 2010, 7:28 pm / dalelane, tv, ubuntu, vdx, sqlite, python, graphs, visualisation, lifetracking

Cartographer.js. “Thematic mapping for Google Maps”—which means an easy way of adding heat maps (aka chloropleths), pie charts and point clusters as a layer over a Google map.

# 1st November 2009, 1:20 pm / google-maps, google, catography, maps, mapping, heatmaps, piecharts, graphs, infographics, visualisation, chloropleths

How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Classy interactive infographic from the New York Times.

# 10th August 2009, 3:37 pm / new-york-times, visualisation, infographics, interactives

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. Enormously entertaining short story about data visualisation and creepy San Francisco bookshops by Robin Sloan.

# 12th June 2009, 6:07 pm / robin-sloan, bookshops, san-francisco, visualisation, shortstory

Visualising Sorting Algorithms. Aldo Cortesi dislikes animations of sorting algorithms, so he designed a beautiful technique for statically visualising them instead (using Python and Cairo to generate the images).

# 14th April 2009, 8:55 am / aldo-cortesi, python, cairo, sorting, algorithms, visualisation

Protovis. JavaScript graphing library based on canvas, with an elegant chaining style API.

# 10th April 2009, 8:43 am / protovis, visualisation, graphs, canvas, javascript

Automating PowerPoint with Python. Useful tutorial on using ActivePython’s win32com module to automate PowerPoint. The example code pulls in the top 50 banks by assets from the Guardian Data Store and generates a treemap using PowerPoint’s shape drawing primitives.

# 3rd April 2009, 3:13 pm / powerpoint, python, activepython, treemap, guardian, datastore, visualisation

UK Guardian Data + ManyEyes = ISAF Troops Contribution Story. Including a heat map showing countries that are contributing the most troops to Afghanistan.

# 3rd April 2009, 2:44 pm / afghanistan, military, guardian, datastore, heatmap, manyeyes, visualisation

Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility (via) Visualisation developed by the European Commission and the World Bank.

# 5th January 2009, 1:24 pm / europeancommission, worldbank, maps, visualisation

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits (via) Stunningly beautiful visualisation of the year in OpenStreetMap.

# 2nd January 2009, 10:34 am / visualisation, openstreetmap, mapping

Noncontiguous area cartograms. a.k.a. really funky data visualisation maps. Includes lots of examples, plus ActionScript 3 source code.

# 8th December 2008, 6:03 pm / visualisation, maps, cartograms, flash, as3

Obama v McCain—battleground graph (via) Paul Crowley provides the smartest election visualisation I’ve seen this cycle, using the current projections from fivethirtyeight.com and with a promise of a frequently updated version as the actual results roll in.

# 3rd November 2008, 8:40 pm / paul-crowley, elections, visualisation, graph