viz.

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.

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

Following up on Nate’s post about retouched photos, The Daily Show has revealed some contemporary presidential image-retouching:

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture.

The BBC has created an interactive graphic that displays Baghdad’s shifting ethnic population as well as the date and location of bombings in the city. Using the slider at the bottom of the graphic, the user can see small points appear and fade away at the bombing locations. Moving through time, the bombings become more frequent. Not only is this a well-made graphic, it is a disarmingly simple demonstration of the rising violence in Iraq’s capital city.