viz.

Google and Twitter have gotten together to create a mashup of Super Tuesday related tweets.

via TechCrunch

PriceofOil.org has posted a dynamic information graphic showing contributions from the oil industry to U.S. presidential candidates.

In the “relationship view,” the more money a politician has accepted from the oil industry, the bigger their picture is on the map. The more money they have accepted from an individual company, the thicker the line will be that connects them. Elected officials & companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving. In the “table view,” politicians are ranked by their total dollar amount received, together with the companies that donated them.

via Information Aesthetics

Yahoo! has created a political dashboard that collects primary and poll information in a real-time, interactive interface (click on the image for a larger view). I’ve been playing around with this tool since the beginning of the year, and I’ve found the way it mixes different kinds of information to be helpful in following the campaigns.

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

Information design guru Edward Tufte will be offering his one-day course “Presenting Data and Information” in Austin on Monday, December 10, and Tuesday, December 11. Here’s the list of course topics from Tufte’s website:

• fundamental strategies of information design
• evaluating evidence used in presentations
• statistical data: tables, graphics, and semi-graphics
• business, scientific, legal, financial presentations
• complexity and clarity
• effective presentations: on paper and in person
• use of video, overheads, computers, and handouts
• multi-media, internet, and websites
• credibility of presentations
• design of information displays in public spaces
• animation and scientific visualizations
• design of computer interfaces and manuals

Registration includes copies of Tufte’s four books, and there is a generous discount for students (it’s basically the cost of the books).

László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology, has created Wikipediavision a mashup of Wikipedia edits and Google maps reminiscent of Twittervision and Flickrvision.

This short film by Boca and Ryan Uhrich provides an introduction to typography while illustrating some of the possibilities of typographic videos.

Here’s a great collection of freehand drawings where the artists were asked to visualize time. The individual images are usually witty statements about their authors’ views of time.

The World Freedom Atlas gathers a number of interesting datasets related to world politics and human rights and converts them into a dynamic map display. Interestingly, the visual display helps to foreground the rhetorical choices made by the authors of those datasets. For instance, the map below displays a country’s governmental structure, ranging from a parliamentary democracy (white) to monarchic dictatorship (dark blue) (Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004). Notice that the U.S., a presidential democracy, falls in the middle of the classification scheme, closer to the dictatorships than Canada and Australia, which are both white, as well as Russia, which is a light teal.

via Information Aesthetics

PikiWiki is a free wiki service that adds drag and drop functionality to collaboratively-edited pages. If you are planning on using a wiki in your visual rhetoric class, PikiWiki might be a good option.