Playing with some maps this evening. It’s pretty interesting to see San Francisco by only its altitude contours.

I get to do a lot of interesting work with the Facebook Data Team. This past week has been quite a lot of fun as I’ve gotten to combine my two loves of social data and story telling by generating a series of graphics for a story about Facebook in the New York Times in the Business section of last Sunday’s paper as well as served up online. Graphics were generated using Processing.

The size of each country’s circle represents how many medals they were awarded for that particular year. Scroll back through each summer games to see how countries fared over time. Click the “by ranking” tab to sort the countries into a list.

The graphic was created using a force-directed graph using a particle system. Countries try to locate themselves near where they are geographically located as well as close to geographically neighboring countries. The circles do not overlap. Flash is a bit too slow to be interactive, so there is a pre-render on our side to determine how each year’s layout will appear.

So for as long as they’ve been around, I’ve been a bit fan of Walk Score. It’s usually been just a toy, however as I get ready to move to San Francisco, I’ve been using it to compare against craigslist apartment rentals to the point where I think I’m getting RSI.

So it made sense to clear things up and take a look at the big picture

Read on for how it was done…
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I’m toiling around with maps a bit lately. I just thought this was a really nice image, the world as seen only by it’s rivers.

This summer’s floods were off the charts. This front-page featured map steps through a week of flood activity. Photographs of the locations are placed on pins in the map.

I’d like to share a work in progress. I’ve been tossing around ideas of what to do with our 3D printer, what might be interesting and engaging. I eventually arrived at this concept.

Each country is represented in their own language, the type creating the shape of the country, each done by hand. I hope that the hand-craft aesthetic of the type is an interesting juxtaposition with the process and material. Each country will be extruded outward a different distance, to correspond to some data set, such as population. Perhaps a series of these could account for multiple data sets.

This post is just to show the proof of concept. I’m working on a piece of software to generate the files to send to the 3D printer. Read on for how I’m doing this.

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