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Instrument collaborated with JD Hooge of Gridplane to conceive and produce designs for a data visualization project for Google. The concept revolved around the idea of aggregating and visualizing the scale and pace of activity as well as the influence of social media over time. The end result of this effort would harness the power of Google Analytics and other data from varied sources and display them in a flexible interface.Instrument developed an application to aggregate the data from sources all over the Internet with deep visual design detail provided by JD.

Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Eigenfactor ranks journals much as Google ranks websites. Scholarly references join journals together in a vast network of citations.

Glocal (global + local) is an immense, collaborative and multifaceted digital art project that examines the making, sharing and exhibiting of images in the 21st century. Working out of the Surrey Art Gallery's TechLab, the artists behind Glocal pose questions about the nature of photography at this point in our history: What is a photograph? What is a camera? What is a photographer?In the context of Glocal Project, Digital Artist Jer Thorp has produced 2 abstract search tools to visually navigate through Glocal's large database of photos. The first image represents the latest tool created by Jer, entitled Glocal Similarity Map Engine, which shows the compositional similarity between a particular image (shown in the center) and other images in the Glocal Pool.

TeleGeography's new Global Internet Map draws upon their annual Global Internet
Geography research to provide a unique view of the world's Internet
backbone architecture.The map's global projection traces the
intercontinental links between the countries of Europe, Asia, North and
Latin America, and Africa. Regional close-ups provide insight into key
routes within each region.

This radial diagram produced by The New York Times and Martin Krzywinski, the developer of Circos, represents the number of small molecules, called methyl groups, attached to segments of chromosome 22 across seven different types of human tissue. Methyl groups are one part of the epigenome, which controls how genes are expressed in different types of cells.

Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked
systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He has
also been previously featured in VC. One of his latest
pieces has been an experiment with the Twitter API, where he tracked the
growth of his Twitter network over a period of 3 weeks. Burak was trying to
understand how connections and particular clusters might expand or contract
over time.The first image is a portrait of Burak's Twitter graph on the
first week of the experiment, when he was following 80 people.

Keith Peters is a generative artist who works mostly in ActionScript 3.0. The images shown here are just part of a growing body or remarkable work which he showcases on his website Art From Code. The quality of the work is almost as impressive as Keith's unpretentiousness. As he explains: "Sometimes I make something that looks nice and put it up here. I call it 'generative art' (...) Other people have different ideas on exactly what generative art means, or what a piece has to consist of or what should have gone into it in order for it to merit that title. So it's up to you what you want to call it.

According to the authors, each city's various subway structures and railway
systems should reflect somehow the character of that city. In an effort to
infuse the city's identity into its subway map, while also trying to
simplify and beautify the original diagram, Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol produced
a series of original maps for three city subway systems - the Seoul Railway,
Tokyo Railway and Osaka Railway. More cities are in the design phase and
others are being planned.The first image depicts Tokyo's intricate
network of subway, lightrail and monorail, with more than 1500 stations
covering the metropolitan area. Placed in the city center is the Imperial
Palace, the residence of the current Ten-no (Japanese Emperor). Subway lines
circumvent the expansive ground claimed by the Imperial Palace.

The Tax Map is a graph of the United States Tax Code, represented as a
network. In the network each node represents a section of the tax code,
while each edge represents a reference from one section to another. As the
author explains, the project was born by a desire to better understand how
the complexity of this mass of rules and exceptions would bear out if one
were to "look at the mere structure of the tax code, stripped naked of its
rules and semantics."Each colored circle represents a section of the tax
code. Size is determined by how many times that section of the tax code is
referenced by other sections of the tax code; while color is determined by
the ratio of references to a particular statute, by references made by the
statute itself. This ratio is then calculated against a color range from
blue to red to determine the final color.

The Complexcity project explores major cities around the world focussing on
how their urban sprawls have evolved over time. Using the patterns formed by
roads in each city, Korean born designer Lee Jang Sub creates complex
graphic configurations, combining the idea of natural and man made systems.
In the process he finds a concealed aesthetic within the convoluted pattern
of urban networks. He started with his hometown Seoul, and has already
completed Paris, Rome, and Moscow.

These work-in-progress maps are part of a study produced in the spring of
2008 for economist Yann Moulier-Boutang, law professor at the French
engineering school UTC. They represent the
linked terms of vocabulary used on the Web to talk about the intellectual
property rights in French. The datasets came from the search engine Exalead SA.Each node is a term
and each edge exists when two terms or expressions are co-cited on a
sufficient number of web pages, over more than 120,000 pages. 1283
expressions and 4984 co-citing links have been selected, assuming a
representative approach against an exhaustive one. The first image is a detail of the
general map where semantic clusters are represented with different
color-nodes.

Twiter Friends Browser is a fun, simple and light application (5k according
to the author) that allows you to browse through all your twitter friends.
You can start by typing a particular twitter username to immediately see all their connections and latest updates. You can then continue clicking and
dragging in an endless friend-of-a-friend network.

The goal of City Murmur is to show how the media differently describes the
urban space through the attention that is given to each street of a city.
In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the online presence in
contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the
media scape with the geographical reality of the city.CityMurmur aims at
addressing maps and diagrams, not as passive representation of realities, but
as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based
narrative, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which
is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support,
critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.CityMurmur is an
on-going project that will be performed in several cities.

Daniel McLaren has built a Facebook friends visualization using his own
flash-based graph visualization tool called Constellation. The interface lets you see which of your
friends know each other. At any given time it will show one of your friends
as the selected node (in bold), and any mutual friends as additional nodes.
Lines between nodes represent friendships. Clicking a node will select it
and you and the new person's mutual friends will appear. Finally, the colour
of the circles represents gender: yellow is female, purple is male,
and grey is unknown.The information cannot be retrieved all at once so
you'll find that the visualization will constantly change as more
information comes in. It takes a while to load the data but it (usually)
gets more interesting the longer you wait.

Every name is rich with meaning, sound, history and character, contributing
to its unique and individual qualities. In order to fully understand the
complexities of baby-naming, Baby Name Brainstorm produced an enticing
interactive graph showing multiple name relationships concurrently.You
can easily discover alternatives and variations on a favourite name or
explore associations through phonetics, spellings, meanings and other
interesting characteristics.

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is a comic creator and new media lecturer based out
of St Albans, England. In E-merl.com Daniel catalogues many of his experiments in
fiction, comics, and hypercomics.In reference to the concept of hypertext
fiction, where narrative is non-linear and non-hierarchical, hypercomics are
a variation of comics that has truly embraced its digital medium, allowing
multiple changeable paths within a fractured rhizomatic environment.

In August 2008, MIT Technology Review reported on how new imaging
technologies are revealing the intricate architecture of the brain, by
creating a series of highly-detailed, and never seen before, blueprints of
its dense connectivity.The typical brain scan shows a muted gray
rendering of the brain, easily distinguished by a series of convoluted
folds. But according to Van Wedeen, an Associate Professor in Radiology at
Harvard, that image is just a shadow of the real brain. A new technique
called Diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) uses magnetic resonance signals to
track the movement of water molecules in the brain: water diffuses along the
length of neural wires, called axons.

I've wanted to add the brilliant work of Eno Henze to VC for quite some
time, but I was struggling a bit with its abstract artistic
nature. I'm not sure why, since it hasn't stopped me before. In fact, if you
want to read more on the noticeable bond between VisualComplexity and
Generative Art, read my blog post on this
topic.Eno Henze is a generative artist, based in Berlin, who has produced
a great array of outstanding projects. What's so interesting about Henze's
work is the strangely organic and painterly outcome based on code. The
images shown here are from a commissioned piece for Aurora - Norwich
International Animation Festival, part of an ongoing series of computer
drawings entitled "The Human Factor", which Eno Henze started in 2006.

Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes. By creating Influence Network Maps, individuals and groups can clarify their own view of a situation, foster discussion, and develop a strategic approach to their networking activities. More specifically, Net-Map helps players to determine what actors are involved in a given network, how they are linked, how influential they are, and what their goals are.The tool is extremely low-tech and low-cost and can be used when working with rural community members with low formal education as well as with policy makers, or international development actors.

Similar to Unfluence, this visualization tool lets users visually explore the relationships between 100 donors and US Governors elected in 2006. Currently the application shows only donors who donated to more than one candidate, or pursued a single donation higher than 100,000 USD.The application, inspired by a conversation with Daniele Galiffa, was produced by Marco Borgna using data from The National Institute on Money in State Politics. The Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization revealing the influence of campaign money on state-level elections and public policy in all 50 US states.

Which artists are a "one-hit wonder" and which artists have a constant
fan-community? Are Radiohead supporters more receptive to different music
trends than hip-hop artist Nelly's fans? Where do certain music genres
cumulate and where is a recently launched album heard first?In order to
answer these and other questions, Christopher Adjei and Nils Holland-Cunz
have observed and analyzed the growing music social network service Last.fm
over a period of four months.

Brother and sister, Chris and Alex Riccomini, have built a visualization exploring the progression and cadence of American poet E. E. Cummings' 1944 collection, "I X I,". Starting at the 12 o'clock position, each bar at the edge of the circle represents a poem. Poems progress in a clock-wise direction. Each ray represents a line in the poem. The coloring of the bar represents the theme of that poem.

These images are part of an animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org
project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this
animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some
edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS
unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial
photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official
data.OpenStreetMap started in 2004 and the rate of contributions is
accelerating with four times as many people contributing to the project in
2008 compared to 2007.

Brandon Martin-Anderson has produced a series of interesting maps from several US cities depicting the shortest path tree within its transportation networks.The shortest path tree is produced by loading street and transit information into a piece of software that computes shortest routes, called Graphserver, and then exporting the resulting tree to a custom-format text file. That text file is read by a program written in Processing, which calculates the width of each branch by recursively summing the length of every branch upstream from the given branch. The Processing program then spits the output to screen.Seen here are the shortest path trees of San Francisco Bay Area (first image) and Portland. Red lines represent transit, black lines indicate walking.

On June 2008, Alan Smith posted a great article on the topic of Nationhood,
on his Personal Cargo, part of the Space Collective community. As he
explains on his post: "As time marches on, we see the weakening of
geographical forces on the lives and activities of humans. The borders we
used to draw are being replaced with centers and relationships of relevance.
People flock to cities, the countryside empties, and the connection to a
National identity in a virtual connected world is no longer the most
powerful connection an indivudal feels to another group. So where will this
trend take us? What will the nations of the future look like?