Gallery
Interactive United States population density map.
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An extension of the concept of histogram to display the colour image content.
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An example of a 3D visualisation, used in this case to represent an object.
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This is an online application that presents backdated meteorological data from Augsburg, Germany. The tool combines the advantages of several static visualisations, such as tables, line graphs and bar charts into a streamlined display. The application is fully interactive and allows the user to look at the information from any angle she wants, literally.
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bar chart, line chart, dashboard, combination chart, time line, 3d object representation
3D London maps, overlaid with air quality data
Air quality data mapped across London for key pollutants. StreetView style visualisation of data at building level (3D).
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3D-rendered map of London showing landmarks and accurate locations of tube lines.
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Extension of a scatterplot to third dimension to represent measurements on sepals and petals of Iris flowers.
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The map shows the average number of pickups for different times of the day and days of week
Roads in a local area within 500m of a postcode containing one or more shops where food is reasonably priced and which sell more than 8 kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables.
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Adjacent bubble charts comparing popular topics
An interactive exploration of how current topics across American politicians on Twitter compares to those across American news outlets on Twitter.
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A graph designed to visualise the level of agreement between two raters. The black squares represent the observed agreement.
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Google maps mash-up showing roadworks in West Sussex.
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Annotated scatterplot with equality line
Earnings between gender for range of jobs, with equality and 10/20/30% difference lines marked.
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A brief history immigration in the United States, winner of a Flowing Data competition.
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Presentation of range of visual outputs looking at the housing market. Analysis is annotated in order to help users understand the significance of what is being displayed.
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This infographic makes use of an eye catching area graph in the shape of cow to display a ranking of meat consumption, expressed in pounds per capita, in 20 countries around the world. The graph is colour coded to differentiate the top and bottom 10 countries. This is supplemented by a visual key that contextualises the information by giving the weight in pounds of several objects and animals.
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Area graph: Pets' carbon print
Area chart with a comparison of the carbon print of several pets against the carbon print of some popular cars.
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A visualization intended to contrast salt content between several foods.
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Excel based area profiler covering a range of datasets allowing demographic description, deprivation context, and priority issues of your area in the context of other local areas.
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A modification of the basic histogram in order to display information for two variables. In this case, the example shows the distribution of some reaction times by gender.
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A generalisation of the boxplot, this visualisation relies on the median (red star) and the representation of 50% of the observations (dark blue area).
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Measures how much knowledge on Millennium Development Goals between 2007 - 2008. Arrow highlights more detail (such as info on ethnicity) on the minority 'know more than 'very little''.
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Deaths from smoking across the six towns, 2002-6 average annual rate per 100,000.
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US political party affiliations for religious traditions (in contrast to <a href="http://datavis/edit.php?id=123">this bubble chart</a>).
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Percentage of 11 year olds achieving Level 4 or above in Key Stage 2 tests for English and mathematics in England.
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Number of people with dementia in Kent by level of severity and age.
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Bar chart comparing mean and upper decile scores
Income Support claimants by ward decile and city type, 2004.
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Bar chart with categories and threshold line
Proportion of the population with tertiary education in selected European counties, 2001.
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Bar chart showing mortality from alcohol for males compared with females, with error limits.
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Bar chart with historical bar chart for context
Serious pollution incidents affecting water, air or land, 1993 to 2007.
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Chart comparing house prices to income for South East and England over a time period.
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Bar line trend chart with baseline
Chart showing real GVA growth over time and output gap.
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bar chart, line chart, combination chart, deviation bar graph
'Biopsy' map of Brentford, constructed through interviews, data, conversations and emotions from 200 local people. It is intended to reflect the range of opinions and viewpoints across these people.
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A block histogram lets you see the distribution of numeric values in a data set. The x-axis is divided into 'bins' that correspond to value ranges. Each item in the data set is drawn as a rectangular block, and the blocks are piled into the bins to show how many values in each range. To see the exact value of a block move your mouse over it. If you are charting more than one dimension use the menu at the bottom of the graph to choose which to show. You can also highlight a block by clicking - use control-click to highlight more than one, and click again to deselect). Highlights are helpful for pointing to particular items when you make a comment or following a particular item as you change the x-axis using the menu at bottom.
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Box plot showing variation in under-18 conception rates per county across England.
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County level 2008 US presidential election returns.
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Presidential Vote Margin by County for Pennsylvania, 2008.
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Bubble chart of UK public spending by government department
Total UK government public spending, by department.
The area of the circles represents the total spend, and the colours are used to distinguish the different departments
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Location of high-tech companies and size of workforce.
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The graphic shows China's international investments from 2003 to 2009 in several dimensions: as the percentage of the total exports; as the overall volume in millions of dollars; and as China’s foreign direct investment. The interactive features help make clear the growing presence of Chinese trade and investment all around the world.
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Measure of who is meeting their Kyoto climate change targets.
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This is a tool offered by the Organisation for Economic co operation and Development (OECD) to help visualise the business cycles around four main themes: Industrial production, business confidence, consumer confidence and composite leading indicators. The cycles are visualised as lines going counter clockwise for any given pair of countries. The regions of the graph represent a section in this cycle:
"Expansion – series is increasing and above 100;
Downturn – series is decreasing but above 100;
Slowdown – series is decreasing and below 100;
Recovery – series is increasing but below 100."
Cartograms are distorted maps, where the geographic areas represent data values, but retain (at least some) similarity in shape to the original map. The Cartogram above shows each country of the world, with the circle size representing annual carbon emissions, the World graphic at the top-right used to establish colours used for continents, and the bar-chart and table at the bottom showing data values in ranked order.
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Cartogram (distorted map) showing recorded crime counts
The two maps both show levels of recorded crime across Leicestershire at Lower Super Output Area LSOA level (with darker red representing higher levels of crime).
The map on the left shows the actual geography of the LSOA areas across the County. LSOA areas each contain roughly 1,500 residents - larger areas on this map therefore represent rural areas with lower-density population.
The cartogram, or distorted, map on the right shows the same data at LSOA level, but represents each of the LSOAs as a fixed size hexagon. This avoids the problem of over-emphasising the more rural LSOAs, seen on the left. However, it becomes more difficult for users to understand which areas are which - so a numbered key is used to identify particular areas.
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Cartogram thematic map (where areas are sized according to their population)
Proportion of people claiming benefits in English cities, 2003.
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Relationship between non-white population and level of deprivation (with different symbols for city types).
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Music sales by format, presented as a centred floating column/bar chart. Each column represents one year, with the peak year highlighted.
A "chart of charts" to help users decide what the best chart is, depending on their needs.
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Chart measuring impact of interventions
Chart measuring interventions which would have the fastest impact on the infant mortality target.
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Oldham Neighbourhood Wellbeing Index. A modified traffic light scheme is used in the maps with red - indicating rates ranked in the highest 10% band, amber - the high 11-25% band, light green - the low 11-25% and dark green - indicating rates ranked in the lowest 10%. In maps displaying rates across the four themes, neighbourhoods with rates ranked in the 26-74% band are white, whereas in maps of trends and sudden changes, those neighbourhoods are shaded yellow, whilst those in white show no trend or sudden change. White is also used for neighbourhoods where no persistently high or low rates are detected. It is in this way that the maps themselves act as visual exception reports.
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Academic citations between journals (inner circle) and fields (outer journal)
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Circular proportional area chart
Comparison of peak sales and 2008 sales for various G.M. brands.
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Circular timeline and bubble chart
The outer circle illustrates presidential periods, the governing party, and whether or not the President died in office. The first inner circle shows the "eras" in history that those time periods covered. The third inner circle shows key foreign conflicts and wars. The fourth inner circle (purple) shows key legislative acts (or series of bills) that were issued. Finally, the bubbles in the middle indicate the average national debt, as indicated every 8 years.
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This plot offers a snapshot of several climatic variables for a station. This type of diagram is widely used by geographers, agronomists and other earth scientists.
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Clustered bar chart with confidence intervals
Clustered bar chart showing inequalities in life expectancy for men and women who live in areas with different levels of deprivation (for Brighton and Hove).
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Table identifying the most deprived LSOAs in Warwick county and each District on the Indices of Deprivation 2007.
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CommuterView is a highly interactive tool which shows flows of commuters based on 2001 Census data (example below). By selecting an area (local authority) of interest within the UK, the major flows of commutes within the area can be seen by moving the mouse. Patterns of flows and major areas of employment are clearly revealed.
Area line chart showing change in housing completions for different time periods.
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Bubble map comparing landmass and population to measure population density. The outer bubble depicts area(sq km) and the inner bubble depicts population. The larger the inner bubble relative to the outer bubble, the higher the level of population density.
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UK consumer spending broken down into categories (bubble size) and, within that, durability (pie chart).
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Compound map with selectable doughnut chart
Breakdown by area of under-18 profiles on national DNA database.
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This is a type of conditional plot where the distribution of a categorical variable is shown to change over the values of a continuous variables. In the example, the distribution of the variable indicating the distribution of the treatment outcome (for an arthritis blind trial conducted in 1988) is plotted against age.
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This is a lattice graph, that allows the presentation histograms for more than one variable.
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This visualisation is used in conjunction with a regression in order to enable statistical inference. Conditional trees are useful for processes that take place in discrete stages.
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A visualisation to display a variable distribution conditional on the distribution of at least a second variable. In the example, the number of breaks is displayed conditional on the type of wool and the level of tension.
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scatterplot, histogram, combination chart, conditioning plot
Graph used to present differences in surfaces. In the example heat colours are used.
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This plot shows a correlation matrix, using blue for positive correlation and red for negative. The ellipses represent the level of correlation.
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This visualisation enables the visual representation of a correlation matrix. This particular example is about lawyers' ratings of state judges in the US Superior Court for 1977 on variables such as judicial integrity, demeanour, diligence and others.
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Rank comparison diagram, comparing credit ratings of nations by different credit ratings agencies.
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Crime mapping - GIS hotspots, and temporal patterns
Crime mapping example - using geographic hotspots alongside temporal patterns (by hour of day) to highlight particular patterns and identify appropriate intervention.
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Textual cross references found in the Bible.
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Cultural Map of the World (Inglehart-Welzel)
This is an application of a factor analysis plot, used in this case to display the 'cultural proximity' of several countries. This proximity is calculated based on survey scores on areas such as politics, religion and social life. The data is 'reduced' to some dimensions (displayed in the axis of the chart) and then plot according to how much they load in each dimension. This type of graph is used specially in qualitative research.
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US housing market figures dashboard on data360.org.
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Comparing total recorded offence trend within each CDRP within Leicestershire compared to the overall county trend.
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The two clouds show the words related to the focus word in both documents in the same manner as for the single Word Association Cloud. The only difference is that colour is used to indicate words that are unique to one document or another. The words in blue on the left are unique to the 2007 SOTU and those in red on the right are unique to the 2008 SOTU. As before, you can click on a word to bring it in focus or click on the top edit box to change it. The clouds are linked in this case so that they always show the same word for both documents.
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Document contrast diagrams use the familiar bubble technique and effective use of colour to contrast topic usage in two bodies of text. Gives a visual summary of the content of two text documents that illustrates shared words, words that are unique to one document or the other, word frequency, relative size of the two documents, distribution of emotional tone within the documents, related words based on co-occurrence, and the most common word in each document segment. This example is the 2007 and 2008 US State of the Union (SOTU) Addresses.
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This chart shows a comparison between the level of capitalisation at two time points.
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Dot plot showing crime levels at LSOA level for major crime types
The dot plot shows, for the twenty highest crime areas in Leicestershire at Lower Super Output Area level, the relative amount of each of the key crime and disorder issues compared to the rest of the county. Solid grey dots show the highest crime levels (relative to the County), while white circles show the lowest crime rates. Those areas shaded green show a reduction in recorded crime levels in the last year, while those in red show an increase in crime levels.
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A conditioning plot with splines added. It allows the visualisation of a variable distribution conditional on the values of the relevant groups of interest.
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scatterplot, histogram, comparative chart, combination chart, conditioning plot
Double document shared word diagrams
Double Document Shared Word Diagrams compare and contrast two documents by showing both the unique and shared vocabulary and its distribution across the two documents of interest. The two columns of squares represent the two documents. The leftmost column of word circles shows the highest frequency non-trivial words found in document 1 but not document 2. The rightmost column of word circles shows those words unique to 2 and the central column shows the words that are common to both.<br />You can also input your text and generate your own visualisation.
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This is an illustration of Britain's Budget for 2010. It is a variation of the pie chart accompanied by information of the relative share of each slice in billions of Pounds.
Proportion of average weekly household expenditure by rural and urban areas, 2005-6.
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Effect plots work by identifying high-order terms in a generalised linear model, a statistical technique. Once these terms are identified fitted values are derived and plotted for the relevant groups.
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Interactive tool that combines the power of a cartogram, a bar chart and a pie chart to explore possible outcomes of the 2010 election.
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An implementation in R of the Elections map produced by The New York Times in 2004.
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This swingometer simulates voter’s change of preference among the main parties as well as the size of the change and its potential impact on the political landscape in each constituency.
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Electoral Map: change exploration
This is a 'swingometer', designed to explore the changes each party requires to gain a majority in parliament.
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Emissions map of Carbon Monoxide per square kilometre.
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Emotion map of Stockport, generated from drawings by local people (placed in correct geographical location) and route traces of 'emotion mapping' exercises.
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How long does it take to burn off various fast food meals through different forms of exercise?
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Draggable world map that re-orients to points North.
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Flow map of Madrid's cultural budget
A static flow map showing how cultural funding is distributed across areas. As actual funding is shown, a scale is provided to the left of the chart.
For further information in English, see the <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2009/12/17/visualizar-09/">Open Knowledge Foundation blog</a>.
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Flow map showing US and China imports and exports
Flow map showing US and China imports and exports.
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map, choropleth map, area chart, combination chart, flow map
Minard's 164 flow map, showing French wine exports. The width of each line represents the volume of wine exported from France. The lines decrease in proportion at each branch point. To keep the presentation clear, Minard distorted many geographic features such as the Strait of Gibraltar.
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Frequency chart showing distribution of income for children and adults.
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Funnel plot generated in excel by the Association of Public Health Observatories to illustrate prevalences.
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Geowise InstantAtlas showing funnel plot alongside area map, bar chart and legends.
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Funnel plot showing stroke admissions against national average
Funnel plot of re-admissions following stroke, for large acute or multi-service NHS Trusts in England. The funnel plot does not rank the data and it takes into account the increased variability of the smaller units.
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This a type of bar chart widely used in project management to display any given task schedule.
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Percentage of 16 year olds achieving 5+ GCSE grades A*-C, comparing Oxford DC and Brighton & Hove UA.
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Gap analysis chart with annotation
Female life expectancy at birth, inequality gap 1999/2000 to 2004/05.
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Interactive/animated multiple-axis chart used on Gapminder site, here showing % Urban Population plotted against Life Expectancy.
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This is a Gastner/Newman cartogram of the 2007 Parliamentary Constituencies. Each constituency is roughly the same size, whilst retaining something of its original shape. The colour shows the Government Office Region.
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Income levels of geo-demographic clusters.
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This chart is designed to aid the interpretation of the results of a cluster analysis, a statistical technique used to discover the underlying structure of a set of observations. The data set contains dummy variables.
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This interactive tool developed by Google offers a large amount of data, ranging from databases on public debt in Europe (in the screenshot) to education statistics in California. It is fully flexible so the user can select can choose between line, char graphs and maps, as well as the contextual information to be displayed.
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Google map generated by MySociety's <a href="http://www.groupsnearyou.com/" target="_blank">http://www.groupsnearyou.com/</a> to show areas covered by various groups within a local vicinity.
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Health profile, benchmarking performance of an area on a range of variables against the regional average.
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scorecard, confidence intervals, deviation bar graph, point chart, traffic light
Plot of the probability density function with emphasis on the highest densities.
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Histogram of rank distribution
Competitiveness Index in rural areas, 2006. The distribution curve in each graph hints at the overall performance and the spread of scores. The skew to the left or higher ranks on both the Overall Index of Competitiveness and the Input measures and the shorter tail confirming greater signs of health in rural local authorities on these measures, than the skew to the right or lower ranks and longer tail on the Output and Outcome measures.
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Ranking of the most deprived five SOAs in Southampton on the Indices of Deprivation 2007 domains.
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1904 map showing housing conditions in Manchester and Salford.
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Interactive chart enabling users to explore interactions between ethnicity, gender, type of abuse and likelihood of being a victim of child abuse. Values can be displayed using bars, bubbles, colours and position on the chart.
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bubble chart, bar chart, comparative chart, combination chart
This online tool combines several sources of information to display life tables in the form of interactive barcharts where the user can select how life expectancy is affected by age, gender and behaviour. The screenshot shows the probability of survival of the class of 25 year olds in England and Wales who are non-active smoker
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US Consumer Price Index through November 2008.
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From the website: "This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble".
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The graphic shows IED attacks on civilians, coalition and Afghan troops during the Afghanistan conflict. The interactive features enable analysis of change in casualties over time while the bubble map captures size location and category of casualty.
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This visualisation presents the predicted relative and absolute level of growth for the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) compared to other emerging and developed economies. The interactive feature of the visualisation allows to easily visalise changes over time as changes in bubble sizes. For example, it is easy to see the waning contribution of European Economies to the World GDP.
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Local Council election results 1974 to 2008.
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Interactive dashboard of UK fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq
An interactive dashboard, showing UK fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Users can change the timeframe to explore changes over time.
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map, bar chart, dashboard, combination chart, bubble map, time series plot
This is an interactive line graph that displays information about the unemployment rate in the US during the last 2 years in terms of ethnicity, gender, age and education level. Whereas this type of information can be displayed simultaneously using a contingency table, the line graph allows the introduction of time a visualisation dimension that allows to easy grasp of the changes and relative comparison with the desired population breakdowns.
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This is a colour coded map designed to summarize the information related to the flight ban caused by the Icelandic volcano in April 2010
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Interactive tool to visualize the progress of the 2010 elections.
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Interactive map and time series (Flu trends)
This map presents an estimate of the intensity of the flu in 20 countries, compared with data for the last six years. The upper panel is a line graph showing the current and past trends of flu intensity by country. The lower panel is the choropleth map with the shading corresponding to the intensity of the flu. The innovative feature of this visualisation is the underlying method of estimation: the intensity of the flu has been approximated based on the number of internet based queries submitted during a certain period of time. Analyses of past data have shown that this method offers good predictions of real levels of the illness.
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Interactive map with detailed description
Interactive Map enabling users to identify services and rank areas by decile (thematic mapping). Map contains significant description of variables used.
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Interactive population pyramid
An example of the use of a visualisation for demography. This pyramid is powered with interactive features to explore the poupulation structure in different territories of Australia.
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This is an interactive visualisation that allows the ranked display of information for most countries in the world on three dimensions: health, living standard and education. The data displayed is available through the United Nations Development Programme and goes from 2003 to 2008.
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This visualization presents large groups of text by using a simple key coloured table that allows the user select a category to reveal more detail. Within each category, the user can see the manifestos of Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat for the May 2010 elections. This type of graph is a appealing alternative to standard tables.
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This visualisation offers some specialised information about a couple of economic indicators: cumulative percentage of change of some currencies against the dollar and the annualized percentage of change in exports. The information is displayed for six developing economies as a way to show the relationship between monetary policy (adopting floating currencies) and the change in the exports. It gives detailed information for each country in order to convey its message to a relatively specialized audience.
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It is a common practice to create indexes to summarize complex information, in this case about the economy. The drawback of indexes is that they sometimes hide the variation of the information they are based on. This visualization presents the evolution of both the index across time and its underlying indicators. For example, it is easy to see how the decrease of the economic outlook has been followed by a reduction of the number of hours worked in the private sector.
This is a tool designed to explore the history of visualization by placing interactive milestones along a timeline. The milestones include graphs, maps and technology that have made possible the change in visualization methods. Each milestone is linked to a detailed explanation and a visual example.
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Interactive timetric line chart
Interactive chart showing user-entered data for Euro-GBP exchange rate.
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Academic citations between journals (boxes) and fields (colours). 'Compass points' indicate citations for a specific journal - incoming (white arrow) and outgoing (black arrow).
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Number of infant deaths per 100,000 live births in selected countries.
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Percentage change in UK house prices over time for data from three sources.
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This visualisation shows the volume of respondents with a particular view/experience and, within that, their characteristics. The vertical axes shows the value being measured (in this case annoyance by noisy neighbours). The Horizontal axis shows the numerical value of people responding to a particular level of the given value.
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Charts the usage of certain phrases over time on historical and contemporary sources.
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A simple graph that allows the presentation means and confidence intervals of several inter-related variables in an experiment.
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Map of London to OAC, from Maptube.
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Dan Vicker's Output Area Classification (OAC) layered on top of Google map using Maptube.
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This visualisation presents the number of foreign high school students in the US in 2008 and contrast it with the number of US students going abroad. The total volume of students is represented by the area covered by the lines.
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The graphic shows the number of claimant of benefits in the UK, according to the statistics available for the Budget 2010.
The three lines represent the overall number of claimants (in pink, secondary axis, people moving off unemployment benefits (in red) and number of people coming on (in black).
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Line chart showing actual teenage conception rates (green line) in comparison to trajectory (red circles), 1997 to 2010.
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This is an example of the use of a line chart to plot mathematical functions.
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The set of line graphs shows how demographics of students in American schools have evolved in the last two decades. Here, New York City schools is selected, compared with New York State schools (gray line).<br /><br />The blue and gray lines are almost parallel everywhere, which tells us that in terms of the change in demographic composition, New York City pretty much resembled New York State during this entire period. <br />However, in terms of demographic composition, rather than the change in composition, New York City schools are very different from the rest of the state, in that the proportion of white is lower by a third while that of minorities are much higher, especially black and Hispanic students.<br />State-wide (as well as city-wide), black and white students have been declining as a proportion while Hispanics and Asians have increased. <br />The extent of the change is immediately visible, Asians have jumped from 7% to 14% for example.
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Line graph with annual breakpoints, targets and trendlines
Number in treatment, year on year in Halton compared with targeted figures.
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Line graph with converging lines
Income before housing costs of a lone Parent with 2 children under 11 in private rented housing compared with gross earnings (by benefit type).
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The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) now provides crime mapping for all of the 43 police forces in England and Wales. Residents can search for a village, town, or postcode to access the latest information on a range of crime types and compare with other neighborhoods.
Data is mapped using Bing Maps, with time series trends shown for the different crime types.
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Where to go when you're on the go.
Map of environmental features of a local area, identifying environmental risks (including climate change) and assets (including water resources). Links visual information with policy based implications.
Map (multi layer): Ageing population
Map showing population trends and change in the old age population. To compare both impacts of population growth and aging population.
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map, bubble chart, choropleth map, combination chart, bubble map
Map and line chart showing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow
Famous visualisation showing Napoleon's advance on Moscow (in brown), and subsequent retreat (in black). The x,y co-ordinates show the armies position over time, with the width of the line representing the size of Napoleon's army. The line-chart at the bottom shows the temperature during the retreat. Note the catastrophic crossing of river Stultienska on November 28th, with the temperature at -20 'Reamur' (-16 Celsius).
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Map of fifty years of space exploration
Representation of all solar, lunar and interplanetary missions.
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Map view of a Similarity graph
This map shows the relationship between 1000 tv shows as a function of their similarity. Each show is linked directly to the 10 most similar shows, which in turn have been grouped into clusters or 'countries'. This mapping techinque is being applied to the visualisation of consumer recommendations, not only for television, but also for music and books.
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Map with accompanying table identifying areas on the map with the high/low scores
Map showing the ratio of overseas migrants to internal migrants across Local Authority Districts in England.
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Maps showing overlap between two indicators
The three maps show Local Authorities with (1) high levels of BNP membership, (2) large non-white populations, and (3) both high levels of BNP membership and large non-white populations.
The use of the blue, red and overlap purple colours make this a geographic "Venn diagram", allowing viewers to quickly identify areas with high levels on two separate datasets.
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Mood map showing sentiment about job security in East of England (as gathered from online BBC survey).
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IMD 2004 ranks for London.
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The matrix chart divides the screen into a grid. Rows represent the values in one text column (e.g., political candidate) and columns represent another text column (e.g., states of the US). Each cell then shows a circle or bar that represents the value for its row/column combination (e.g., contribution to Hillary Clinton from New York).
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Measuring statements from survey
A survey gives a list of statements to choose from - from weak to strong statements. This shows that the sample was split between negative and positive views on the Government's role.
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A chart used to summarise the findings of several studies about a common variable. It presents confidence intervals for each one of the studies considered. The example presents data on the effectiveness of silver sulfadiazine coating on venous catheters for preventing bacterial colonisation of the catheter and bloodstream infection.
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This type of plot is used to visualise contingency tables by proportionally representing the size of the cells. It can also be used to visualise the fit of the log-linear model technique. The example shows a three dimensional table with data of hair, eye colour and gender in 592 statistics students.
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This map presents information about the murder rate in the United States during 1976. It shows the rates in six intervals, relying on several smaller maps to do that.
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Mortality change by cause of death.
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A bar plot that allows the combination of multiple histograms and visualisation of several variables.
Spider pie graph of deaths by year 1854-1855.
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Diagram showing location and type of office space available in San Francisco skyscrapers.
This infographic presents the final medal count for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in several dimensions. The central part shows the distribution of medals by continent using proportional bubbles to reflect the count. The inner circles of these bubbles are pie charts split by the type of medal. The same technique is applied in the other dimensions presented: medals by geopolitical groups (China, EU, ex soviet republics) , by sport (swimming, athletics, gymnastics) , by GDP and by population. It also contains full information of the final medal count by country and a day-by-day gold medal count (annotated bar char in the lower half). All parts of the visualisation are commented to give an overall picture of the event.
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Opinion change over time - with photo prompts
Shows how visualisations have changed over time. Use of photos to make the issue explicit.
Shows the sample's level of concern about poverty in poor countries. Sample is categorised between the sample's segments (eg., activists, sympathisers).
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Parallel Sets is a technique for visualizing categorical data. It helps you get away from representing individual data points, and instead show sets and subsets of items with certain combinations of criteria.<br />This example illustrates the people on board the Titanic. In a way, ParSets is a mix between parallel coordinates and treemaps/mosaic plots.
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treemap, parallel coordinates, comparative chart, proportional area chart
Personicx-Geo Interactive Spider
Geodemographic clusters and average age band. Also provides background information on the cluster.
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Perspective plots are used to represent surfaces in statistics and geographical representations.
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A phrase net diagrams the relationships between different words used in a text. Could be used to analyse interview data or other textual documents where a deeper understanding of the meaning is required.
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Fuel use of various modes of transport.
Pictorial bubble map showing numbers of web-service users by country. The number of headsets shows the number of users, and the colour of the headsets distinguishes between active and inactive users.
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Pictorial illustration of data
Picture image illustrating a statistic (that one in five people eat five or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day).
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Pictorial stacked percentage chart
Percentage of carbon cost for various activities involved in making one bottle of Innocent smoothie vs one can of Coke.<br /><br />There is a major misleading aspect to this visualisation: The use of varying widths for the two bars suggests to the viewer that the coke can produces significantly more CO2 than the smoothie bottle. Examination of the text shows that this is not the case.
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Pie and zoom-in-stacked column
Ethnic minority breakdown in a Rotherham ward.
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pie chart, table, proportional area chart, 100% stacked bar chart
Comparison of feelings of safety when outside in the local area, in the day and after dark for Staffordshire and Districts.
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This is a very rich infographic that combines several visualisation types: bubble chart, population pyramid, comparative line charts, a map, pie charts and it is additionally fully annotated. The picture itself is crossed by a line (without reference axis) that communicates the main message of the infographic: the rapid population growth experienced by the UK in recent decades. The supplementary charts display information about population proportions, population densities, age and gender structure, comparison between migration related and “natural” population change, fertility rates during the last 35 years and lastly population changes by government region during 2007-08. The display is very rich and is successful at grabbing’s the reader’s attention by offering an appealing combination of related data.
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map, bubble chart, pie chart, line chart, population pyramid, combination chart
Population pyramid identifying the age profile of an area benchmarked against the UK average.
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Postcoded geodemographic map with OS background
Mosaic profile at postcode level of St Leonards ward in Exeter.
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Shows probability of defaulting on mortgage increase when amount owed surpasses value of property. 'Underwater' section shows loan-to-value ratio of more than 100%.
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Visualisation used to show the relative position of research objects. In the example there are four brands rated for several dimensions in a survey.
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Quadrant plot comparing importance and need for improvement on crime targets.
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Qualitative data presentation - standard
In the majority of cases qualitative data is presented like this. It is the text in its raw form although the quotes will be organised by theme, which is an important part of the analysis phase. It is also common to anonymise the quotes. In some cases, it is best to present the data like this; it contains the richness of meaning.
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A complex graph for presenting detailed population about population growth. It integrates other visualisation types: Histograms, representation of the quantile regressions, and boxplots for the residual values.
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Minimum, maximum and population-weighted mean rank of LSOAs in each Government office Region for the IMD Income Domain.
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Comparison of ranking of sectors in FTSE 100 between March 2007 and March 2009.
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Ranking Histogram for conception rate of under 18 year olds (per 1,000 15-17 year olds) in 2002-04 for all LAs in England.
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Rectangular choropleth cartogram of people with HIV
A world-view cartogram for World's Aids Day. The size of a region indicates the number of people infected with HIV - each square being 10,000 people infected. The colour of a region indicates the rate of infection, in relation to the global average.
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The West Midlands Regional Observatory summarizes information about several indicators across the region. In the screenshot, a comparative view of the proportion of people claiming Jobseekers allowance across the region
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Interactive map to report faults in services provided by a council.
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Summary performance of Hartlepool on key child health indicators.
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bar chart, scorecard, proportional area chart, deviation bar graph, traffic light, stacked bar chart
As part of the project ‘Mapping the UK's Research & Intellectual Property’, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has developed this interactive tool that combines several types of visualizations to offer a dynamic view of the subject in the UK. It shows through time the change of the hotspots and intensity of investment in several subjects: radio frequency identification, plastic and electronics, regenerative medicine and advanced composite materials. The map on the left shows the investment intensity in the form of hotspots located geographically and colour coded by subject. The panel on the right shows the cumulative investment in each subject.
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This is a visualization technique developed to describe how performance varies across the 54 libraries in Leicestershire.
From the report “Creating RF Plots for all libraries allows us to see variation within and between the different sites. Whilst the seven largest libraries dominate in terms of absolute numbers, scaling the colour scheme by a power function allows us to see variation amongst the smaller quantities” (p. 2).
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All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. The density represented corresponds to the density of the street network.
This is a circular histogram plot which displays directional data and the frequency of each class. It is widely used in geography, geology and other earth sciences.
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Life expectancy by disease (for males) in Hammersmith and Fulham and England.
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Scarf chart of income tax by income level
This chart shows contribution towards total UK Income Tax that each income group (broken down by percentage) makes. From this, we can see that taxpayers with the highest 10% of income paid just over half of all Income Tax for the time period shown. Connectors between the columns therefore indicate each group's relative contribution.
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This is a lattice plot that displays scatter plots for three variables grouped in three clusters, in the example. Useful for a quick visualisation of the contingencies of the data set.
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scatterplot, comparative chart, combination chart, conditioning plot
Scatterplot with histograms and dispersion markers
This visualisation integrates the capabilities of histograms, scatterplots and dispersion indicators in a single graph with interactive features.
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Scatterplot with axis indicating the marginal distribution of a variable.
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Scatterplot: Fully labelled and colour coded
Scatterplot showing relationship between importance and quality of services in Southend. Scatterplot includes label for each of the services as well as a line to denote which services need improving. Services are colour co-ordinated.
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Scatterplots with smoothed densities colour representation
A scatterplot designed to represent the probability density function of a random variable.
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Chart showing the proportion of an offence type within a particular CSP is significantly much higher, slightly higher, as expected, slightly lower or much lower compared to the profile of offences cross the whole county.
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Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, Alcohol related harm admission rates (NI 39), wards benchmarked against the county average.
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US political party affiliation for each religious tradition - bubble size shows percentage of religion affiliated with chosen party.
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The book of odds is an interactive tool that allows the visualisation of the odds of particular statements through the display of semantic networks. The window on the right displays the numerical information associated with a statement displayed in the window of the left as a node in a network. Semantic nets represent the conceptual links between interconnected concepts. Widely used in artificial intelligence these visualisations have also been employed in marketing and business as a tool to clarify customer insights.
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Sensory map created by depriving people of sight and sound, and having them walk through an area while notes are taken on what they experience.
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Chart showing the employment composition of the most employment deprived areas over time.
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Visualisation useful in the display of contingency tables. The rectangles are proportional to the expected counts for each combination.
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Retail activity in London.
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SMS activity in Amsterdam over New Year's Eve.
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Southwark atlas of health (annotated map)
This map is part of a series of visualisations aimed at giving an overall picture of public health in south east London. In this map, it is possible to see the prevalence of heart disease using the gradation of the colour in the area and the localization of hotspots. The atlas of health comprises several examples ranging from teenage pregnancy to socioeconomic classification of the habitants and it is a good example of the use of public information in a geodemographic context.
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Guardian interactive diagram showing proportion of words devoted to particular themes during Gordon Brown's speech to US congress (March 2009).
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Health poverty Index indicator score for Peterborough 2003 and 2005.
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This type of graph is a modification of the histogram In the example, the distribution of the treatment outcome for an arthritis blind trial conducted in 1988 is plotted against age.
Vehicle offences in Wiltshire at LSOA level.
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Data on women in information technology using square pie. A square is divided into 10x10 fields, and for each number, as many fields are filled in as there are percent. Consequently, the numbers remain readable by simply counting the number of fields covered by one colour. Taking a hint from squarified treemaps, the areas should also be as square as possible for better comparability.<br />The square pie chart is for completely flat data that adds up to 100%, whereas the treemap shows structured data: a hierarchy. They may end up looking the same, but the meaning is not.
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This visualisation is an example of a square pie. A square is divided into 10x10 fields, and for each number, as many fields are filled in as there are percent. Consequently, the numbers remain readable by simply counting the number of fields covered by one colour. Taking a hint from squarified treemaps, the areas should also be as square as possible for better comparability.
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Trends in UK carbon emissions and future targets.
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Stacked bar chart comparing citizens advice bureau issues for different geographical areas.
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Qualifi cations as a percentage of working age population 2008 in Bristol. Stacked bar charts allow direct comparisons between the partition of a variable for two or more geographical areas. In the example, the differences between Bristol and the region are easy to see.
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These bubbles visualise the expectations of people to see a woman as President of the United States.
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Stacked column (with error limits and national baseline for benchmarking)
Performance of health trust in terms of the service provided by GPs.
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bar chart, confidence intervals, range bar chart, traffic light
Renewable energy targets 2000-2016.
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UK household consumption - selected areas.
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This chart shows that that there are different numbers of people who find that various professions 'prestigious'.
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A modification of the radar plot, it is useful in the presentation of multivariate data.
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Various presidential election statistics displayed as state or county tagcloud.
Comparing the likely risks and impacts of various policies and interventions.
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Music artists listened to over time, using data taken from last.fm
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This visualisation is a combination of an area graph and a time line. The areas here are used to represent the gross box office results of movies relased between 1986 and 2008. The visualisation is enhanced with links to reviews of the movies included.
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US Box Office data, showing takings and ranking each week. This visualisation is based on the data and original idea displayed <a href="/vis/id=282">here</a> but uses an alternative method to calculate and depict the areas on the graph.
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Chart summarising roles of different organisations within a Local Area Agreement. Useful for benchmarking, comparing areas by responsibility. Cross tabular information
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This visualization explores the possible changes in voter's preferences for the 2010 elections and displays the seats at stake for each possibility.
Animation showing growth of target stores across America, from Flowing Data.
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A type of scatterplot, this visualisation allows the representation of three variables. In the example, the plot presents the proportions of employment in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors for 12 European countries in 1978, 1986 and 1997.
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scatterplot, comparative chart, combination chart, ternary plot
The top left set of connected circles represents a partial view of a graph showing inter-relationships between words. There is a central ring of the primary words of interest and a secondary outer ring of some other words related to the central set. Click on an inner word to remove it from the central ring. Click on an outer word to add it to the central ring. In either case the words on the secondary ring are dynamically adjusted to show the 'most important words' related to the central set. The strength of the connections between the inner words and all the others are shown with simple lines. You can also hold down the number '1' key while clicking to make that word the only central word. <br /><br />The top right shows a collection of bar graphs giving the distribution of the primary words across the entire document. Underneath it is a small map showing the distribution of the words across the entire document. The bottom right gives a list of other interesting words that aren't already in the circle diagram - high frequency but modified so that capitalised words are boosted. These words can be clicked on to add them to the central diagram. The bottom left gives excerpts for the word last hovered over. There are 5 or 6 files you can explore by clicking on the upper left '?' icon.
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Brainstorm of sustainability issues.
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Thematic map including area and hinterland
The Vulnerable Localities index mapped across Stafford district. Red indicates a high score, green indicates a low score. Districts are ordered by those with the highest number of output areas with a VLI score above 200.
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Example of a three dimensional plot. It creates depth by greying out points further 'away'.
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Map of UK by parliamentary constituency showing percentage of population claiming JSA. Slider at bottom allows users to choose a time point.
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Time line area chart showing size of US government interventions.
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Time line of the political landscape in Germany
This visualisation combines the characteristics of a time line with those of a bar graph to display the proportional political composition of parties in the government and opposition from 1950 to 2009. There is plenty of information for each data point in the annotations that accompany the graph.
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Time line: Globlal media scare stories
This time line relies on the use of area charts on several depth levels. Each chart presents the number of stories per topic against time giving a good sense of the evolution trough time of media coverage of some recent news.
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This plot represents the outcome of a forecasting model a with simulated data set. The orange region show the confidence intervals for the forecast.
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Scatterplot is used to compare of driving habits and petrol prices. Each point in the plot is joined to the previous years point, with the drawn path indicating order in time.
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scatterplot, line chart, combination chart, time line, time series plot
Votes by state for all US presidential elections.
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Main source of news and information - 1800 to 2020.
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Join Strategic Needs performance, good or bad performance relative to the county average on health indicators for wards in Oxfordshire
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This is an interactive tool to visualize debate transcripts.<br />Click on the 'Load another transcript' button to choose a different transcript. The top section shows the distribution of some selected words within the text across a 'timeline' which goes from left to right. Each speech segment is the same width and the height of the small white bars show the number of occurrences of that word for that segment. You can add new words with the text box in the top right corner. You can remove existing words by clicking on them.<br /><br />Right below the word distribution graphs is a similar coloured set showing a spectral decomposition of the text based on who spoke and how much was said. In this case the bar heights give the amount of text for each segment. Click and drag the mouse left to right to move along the timeline and show the actual text for 3 consecutive segments.
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Travel time cross-reference map (interactive)
Map showing areas within a chosen travel time from Department for Transport, and with median house price between chosen criteria.
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Map of London showing travel time from various locations to Department of Transport, Pimlico.
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BME population by sex, limiting long-term illness and not in good health(excluding White British group) in Staffordshire.
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This graph presents the ratios of the three variables as positions in a triangle.
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This visualisation is a variation of the concept of histograms, combining observed and predicted distributions in a simple way.
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CO2 Emissions in Essex and Districts in 2004 in quantity and per head.
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bar chart, proportional area chart, combination chart, point chart, stacked bar chart
Rank of overall health of Districts in North Yorkshire.
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Framework Programme 6 R&D collaborations between European universities that cooperate in more than ten research projects.
Saturday track record of three participants of the UrbanDiary project recorded in London. The data is plotted with the z-axis representing time of the day. The time frame in this case is 24 hours and starts from the bottom at 00h00 passing the time upwards to 24h00. Each participant has a time reference icon over the home location, where the journey starts and ends.
There is one female and two male participants, of whom the female and one male participant have family. The single male goes in to work just as normal although it is a Saturday and returns home in the afternoon to do some sport activity locally where he lives. His journey starts at 08h23, ends at 17h19 and travels around 15 km. The woman does some local activities with her family and travels in to her workplace briefly later on. She starts her day at 07h01, ends at 20h09, and covers 30 km wile traveling. The Second male participant spends his day in the local area. This journey starts at 11h45, ends at 18h53, and measures 5 km.
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Venn diagrams are usually used to visualise the space where a set lies in relation to other sets. In this case, the diagram is used to illustrate the key components of data visualisation the along the dimensions of information and design. The intersection areas are all clearly named and indicate explicitly the outcomes to be achieved when putting more or less emphasis in each area. Readers interested in topic might want to see our
<a href="http://improving-visualisation.org/case-studies/id=6">
guide on data visualisation.</a>
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Animated map of Twitter usage during Barak Obama's inauguration.
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This graph is a modification of the boxplot that enables the representation of densities and other distributions. The image shows the boxplot together with its possible modifications.
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Second Life object developed by Daden Ltd, showing UK weather reports from data brought in externally via a Yahoo RSS feed.
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Comparison of what is important for people of different ethnic groups in making an area a good place to live.
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A graph used in meteorology to represent the speed and direction of the wind.
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Partners word cloud, with size of the words based on the frequency that specific issues/ factors were raised in strategy documents
A word tree is a visual search tool for unstructured text, such as a book, article, speech or poem. It lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases. Note: all submitted data remains publicly viewable.
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Wordcloud with integrated video and transcripts
Interactive word cloud of Gordon Brown's speech to European Parliament, where each word links to video and transcript of that word being used.
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The most frequently used words in a text. The Wordle can visualise the relationship between a column of words and column of numbers. Or, it can strip out the punctuation and show word frequency within a text.
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The World Bank has created a complex visualisation tool to make available 49 indicators for 209 countries and 18 aggregates from 1960-2007. Data includes social, economic, financial, information & technology, and environmental indicators. The visualisation is completely customizable bubble chart in the spirit of 'gapminder' and the user selects the x and y axis dimensions as well as the variable that determine the size of the bubbles and the time point to be displayed.
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Map of deprivation with zoom-ins for key areas.
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