Seeing Data

GeoNet have created a line chart to show the volume of web traffic they received in the days following the 2010 Christchurch earthquake. There are three main things to keep in mind when you read the graph: The green line shows the number of hits their website was receiving per second (in one minute averages). The orange diamond … Read More

An incredible video created by Scott Manley shows the locations of known asteroids starting in 1980. As asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. Armagh Observatory host a current map of the solar system where you can see a two dimensional projection of known near-Earth objects. Read More

I created a video to animate six months of 2010 New Zealand seismic activity data picked up by the GeoNet sensors. The animation begins in April and ends a few days after the 7.1 quake that hit Christchurch on September 4. Keep in mind three things when you view the video. Blue circles represent seismic activity recordings. Each event … Read More

A quick post to note that Paul Nicholls has created a nice animation of the Christchurch Quake Map. He’s representing several variables at once. In addition to location and time, he depicts both magnitude (circle size) and depth (circle colour) while providing a running textual report of seismic events. It is well worth checking out. Read More

Mike Dickison, from the excellent Pictures of Numbers information design blog, has been working with GeoNet’s seismic data. This morning Mike asked the Internet “has anyone produced a graph of all the aftershocks and their intensity over the past two days?” It seemed that nobody had, so he created his own … by hand. The figure below is a … Read More

I awoke yesterday morning to a stream of tweets and news articles reporting a massive earthquake near Christchurch. I followed the coverage throughout the day, reading the surreal accounts of everyday scenes turned upside down. Every so often an aftershock would ripple across Twitter and I would get a sense of the rhythm, if not the magnitude, of the event. Read More

Why visualise data? In the introduction to his classic text, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte answers this question in three words. “Graphics reveal data”. To illustrate his point Tufte asks the reader to examine four datasets of eleven (x, y) datapoints, collectively known as Anscombe’s quartet. I’ve reproduced them in the … Read More