My Favorite Visualizations - October

In August, I published the first series of My Monthly Favorite Visualization. This semester, I have a course called Data Visualization in Networks. The Fall semester is still on-going but it is quite striking that my perception of "good visualization" has been changing. I realized it is not just a matter of aesthetics, but also readability, user interaction, etc. Being busy with the research, I skipped the September! However, I came across a lot of cool visualizations so I merge September and October here and enumerate some cool visualizations!

1. Migration in Motion

If you are curious about the effect of climate change on the habitats and ecosystems, Dan Majka made an amazing tool to show what paths animals will take to reach their new habitats under the influence of projected climate change. The data came from a study which investigated the effect of human intervention on the pattern of species movements to find better habitats. This paper pointed out the human-made barriers which alter the climate-driven migrations. The tool is interactive, enabling the users to see the continent-wide effect of climate change on migration patterns. If you would like to know more about Dan's work, follow him on Twitter!

2. Time Map

Let's say you are supposed to meet a friend in Downtown. She calls you asking how far you are from the meeting location. You check the map on your phone. According to the distance, you may say "I'll be there in 10 mins". Isn't it quite interesting that we answer a question of physical distance by time units?! What if we have a visualization which ignores the physical space and operate only based on time? So Peter Liu turned this idea into reality and called it Time map! Whenever you search for a place, the app puts you in the center, preserves the direction, but the distances are determined by the time that it takes you to get there. The tool is designed using Mapbox which is an open source platform for location data founded back in 2010.

I guess this is it for October! If you like you can find me on Twitter so you'll know whenever I share a new blog post!