Organizational chart of Italian company Arci Magnolia, created to show its hierarchies and competencies in one single view. The center of the circle shows the various skill sets within the organization, which are mapped by color (e.g., administration is represented by purple, communication by orange, and Web services by gray). The numbers in the inner ring represent twenty-six managers, arranged alphabetically in a clockwise fashion, while the outer ring consists of the names of those who report directly to them.
Map of the education landscape in various African countries. These countries are represented on the outer ring; the size of the circle next to each represents the average number of years spent in school (largest indicating the longest time). Inside this ring is a separate visualization that shows male (light blue) and female (orange) youth literacy rates as a percentage, with 0 percent at the core and 100 percent at the edge of the circular grid. The visualization was created for the AFRICA—Big Change / Big Chance event at Triennale di Milano, an exhibition on architecture and changes taking place on the African continent.
Andreas Cellarius
Theoria Solis Per Eccentricum Sine Epicyclo (Representation of the sun in an eccentric orbit without epicycles)
1660
Map from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660), a star atlas written by the Dutch-German cartographer Andreas Cellarius. This image illustrates the presumed orbit of the sun around the earth, based on the geocentric world system of Claudius Ptolemy. Plotted within the zodiacal circle, the unconventional off-center orbit of the sun tries to shed light on the difference between the fall-spring equinox interval (187 days) and the spring-fall equinox interval (178 days). Today, we know this discrepancy is due to the inconsistent speed of the earth as it orbits, moving faster when closer to the sun.
Illustration of the zodiac in relation to a particular alchemical process, from a treatise by Nicolas Flamel on alchemy and astronomy. A French alchemist and manuscript seller, Flamel came to prominence posthumously for supposedly uncovering the philosopher’s stone and, according to legend, attaining immortality.
Compass created by an unknown Venetian cartographer, part of the Isolario (1560–64), an atlas that maps the islands and coastal regions of the Mediterranean.
Published by the US Census Office at the turn of the twentieth century, a visualization that maps the rate of death by accident and injury (top two charts) and suicide (bottom charts) by month, for cities and rural districts of the registration states in 1900. This diagram is an example of a radar chart, a type of plotting that can show one or more series of values over three or more axes, arranged radially as spokes around a central point.
A project in which the Swedish architect Hannes Frykholm speculated how future generations might uncover and excavate the twentieth century. This visualization maps a number of possible archaeological excavation sites in relation to the existing railway system in Detroit. With help of the legend, viewers can create a themed itinerary for a potential visit suited to their historical interests.
Diagram graphing the responses of more than one hundred thousand teachers to a survey on teacher-student engagement conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It charts the happiness levels (outer ring), hours worked (inner circles), and motivations (plotted lines) of teachers from thirty-four economically advanced countries. The central starburst displays the percentage of respondents under the age of thirty.
Visualization of some of the more intangible and unquantifiable qualities of the life of graphic designer Valentina D’Efilippo.
This diagram categorizes conversations D’Efilippo has had with various people, who are mapped around the outer edge of the circle. Topics are represented by semitransparent layers, with different colors showcasing interesting overlaps (pink representing topics involving fashion and photography; maroon: university and job; olive: politics and the economy; dark blue: design and art; light blue: movies, books, and music; and yellow: clubbing, travel, and entertainment).
Comparison of online usage among different audiences, organized by demographic categories (e.g., gender, age, and education level) and commerce sectors. These visualizations are built on the technology and methodology of the data-management company nugg.ad.
Etching, 17 × 17 inches (43 × 43 centimeters).
The mobile app edition of actor Stephen Fry’s autobiography The Fry Chronicles. It allows the reader to engage with the text through a visual index of key themes: people, subjects, emotions, and “Fryisms,” each of which is color-coded (e.g., love is shown as magenta and comedy as orange). The overall structure is visualized through a circular wheel of spines, each of which represents a section of the book.
Taken from a medical textbook on diagnostic techniques involving the iris, an illustration of the effect on the iris of a variety of illnesses, from arsenic poisoning (figure b) to “acute nervous disorder” (figure e).
Created by designer Doug Kanter to help monitor his type 1 diabetes, a visualization that shows every diabetes-related data point he collected in 2012, including more than ninety thousand blood-sugar readings and thousands of insulin doses. The image is read clockwise, with each line representing one day. Blood-sugar readings are shown by color: low blood sugar in warmer tones, in-range readings in white, and high blood-sugar readings in cooler colors. Along the outside, black lines correspond to the distance the designer ran throughout the year, which peaked in November with a marathon.
Comparison of weather data provided by the Dutch Meteorological Institute and more than 710,000 posts in social media about the weather, to establish whether a correlation exists between the two. The visualization shows a ring of 365 days, on top of which are superimposed graphs of weather elements such as sunshine or rain. The size of the gray bubbles indicates the quantity of social media messages about the weather, and their placement on the line of the day indicates the average sentiment on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most positive.
Giorgio Uboldi and Michele Mauri (DensityDesign); Cristina Perillo and Iolanda Pensa (lettera27)
Share Your Knowledge—Artgate
2011
A project carried out between September and November 2011 that encouraged organizations to create and expand Wikipedia entries. This visualization poster shows a number of Wikipedia pages that were created and modified as part of the project, displayed radially in alphabetical order. The first ring represents the share of new pages created and old pages modified during the project; the second ring shows the number of page views for each page. Finally, a stacked bar chart represents the number of bytes edited: red edits are by users involved in the project, whereas blue edits are by other users.
Chart recording the air quality of Beijing over the course of sixty days. Five principal air pollutants are represented by five color-coded inner rings: PM 2.5 (red), PM 10 (yellow), sulfur dioxide (brown), nitrogen dioxide (green), carbon monoxide (purple). The lined gray pattern depicts the daily average of the air quality index, while the dotted arrows indicate the air quality index minimum and maximum values for each day.
Johann Baptist Homann
Systema Solare et Planetarium Ex Hypothesi Copernicana (Solar system and planetarium according to the Copernican hypothesis)
1716
Chart showing the Copernican model of the universe. Johann Baptist Homann was a renowned German cartographer, appointed Imperial Geographer by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1715. This map is included in his masterwork, Grosser Atlas ueber die ganze Welt (Grand atlas of all the world). At the center is the sun, orbited by the known planets, with the twelve constellations of the zodiac in the outermost ring. The lower left-hand corner shows Earth at the time of the solar eclipse of May 12, 1706.
Oil on canvas, 27.33 × 27.33 inches (69.5 × 69.5 centimeters).
The Luxury of Protest (Peter Crnokrak)
A_B Peace & Terror etc. The Computational Aesthetics of Love & Hate
2008
Visualization of the ways in which each of the 192 member states of the United Nations contributes to peace and terror in the world. The project is a dual-sided poster: the A side, shown here, displays measures of peace, while the B side shows measures of terror. The graph follows the same format on both sides, with three rings that represent individual quantitative measures obtained from researchers working on geopolitics. Variations in these metrics are represented by line width: thicker lines have higher values.
Radial diagram dividing a selection of font classics into seven major classification groups, listed at the core: Serif Old Style (fonts such as Garamond or Lucida), Serif Modern (Didot or Century), Sans Geometric (Century Gothic or Futura), Slab Serif (Clarendon or Rockwell), Sans Humanist (Optima or Formata), Serif Transitional (Georgia or Baskerville), and Sans Neo-Grotesque (Arial or Helvetica).
Andrea Codolo and Giacomo Covacich
Il fiore dell’istruzione. Un po’ appassito (The education flower. A little withered)
2012
A visualization of educational standards in thirty-four countries across the world, based on data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report Education at a Glance 2012. The colored petals show level of education according to age and diploma type, while the pistils and stamen show annual expenditure per student and the investment in education, respectively.
Manuel Bortoletti, Daniela Bracco, Francesca Rossetto, Paola Santoro, and Erica Zipoli
Dati inconsci—Un confronto alla luce del sole (Unconscious data—a daylight comparison)
2014
Chart displaying an overview of sleep patterns through a single night from data the designers collected on their own phones. The four lines, plotted clockwise, represent the sleep cycles of the four participants. The lines fluctuate on a vertical axis between deep sleep (low) and light sleep (high) and are arranged around a circle comprising eight hours.
A chart mapping how often two baseball teams were mentioned in the New York Times between 1984 and 2009: the New York Yankees (blue) and New York Mets (orange). Each line represents an individual story. Color indicates prominence, with the darkest lines representing front-page stories and lighter ones registering mentions in other sections.
Chart by William Farr, a nineteenth-century British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the founders of medical statistics. Featured in The Report on Mortality of Cholera in England (1852), it displays the temperature and mortality rate in London for every week over the course of eleven years (1840–50). In each individual chart, black shading in the outer ring denotes the amount by which weekly deaths exceeded the average, yellow the amount by which they were below the average. The red color in the inner ring shows how much the mean weekly temperature exceeded the mean temperature of the years 1771–1849; the solid black shows how much the mean weekly temperature was below that for the same period.
Project investigating the impact of heat waves and snowstorms in thirty-five cities around the globe. Each city is presented as a ring, with its climate characteristics visualized so that the viewer can easily spot any unusual weather events. The closer a temperature line is positioned to the center of the circle, the colder the minimum temperature of each day; similarly, the farther away the line is, the warmer the maximum temperature. Color indicates the daily mean temperature (reds being warm and blues being cold). Precipitation is represented as a circle, with size proportional to amount.
Diagram of page views and edits on Italian Wikipedia in 2013, divided into three layers. The center shows overall edits of Wikipedia; the inner ring shows the five pages with the most editors; and the outer ring shows the most-visited pages. The colors represent topic categories: cinema, politics, current events, sports, music and culture, history, and miscellany. Months are radially distributed (the letters refer to the initials of each month in Italian: G for January, D for December).
Self-quantification project compiling data associated with the author since birth. Starting from the center, the rings show the locations in which he has lived, his interests, the cars he has owned, the sports he has played, and the educational institutions he has attended. The outermost ring shows happiness, while the protruding lines represent the hours he worked in the supermarket Tesco.
Jaeho Lee, Dongjin Kim, Jaejune Park, and Kyungwon Lee
Flow Circle: Circular Visualization of Wiki Revision History
2013
Diagram charting the revision history of the Wikipedia page for “gun politics.” The visualization tool Flow Circle bases revision histories on snapshots of a page in various stages of its development and maps different types of relationships among authors of the article.
Visualization of the demographic data collected from a single thirty-seven-minute journey the designer took on bus number 174 in Singapore. Information such as the other riders’ ethnicity (Chinese passengers represented by green, Indian by blue, Malay by dark blue, and “foreigners” by purple), gender (male by red, female by orange), and age (adult by yellow, senior citizen by lime green, and student by light lime green) is mapped by individual bars.
A project that measures data about a film in order to reveal its visual properties. The author deconstructed several movies into a set of basic components, such as video, audio, chapters, and subtitles, and processed them in order to extract a few specific traits, such as color palette and shot length. The resulting interactive visualization provides what the author calls a movie’s “fingerprint.” Shown here is the fingerprint for the movie Quantum of Solace (2008). Segments are organized in a clockwise fashion, each representing ten shots in the movie; the colored rings match the predominant hues within that segment.
Črtomir Just, Matej Končan, Manuel Kuran, Luka Zevnik, Ahac Meden, Ivor Knafelj, and Gregor Purgaj
Braindance
2014
A neuro-art project that visualizes the brainwaves of twenty participants as they listen to a musical composition for the first time. The chart depicts two specific measures: focus (concentration), in turquoise; and flow (relaxation), in orange.
A diagram that allows viewers to search for correlations among six seemingly disparate metrics from fifty countries: happiness ranking, amount of sunlight, gross domestic product, obesity rate, murder rate, and population density.
