Rikenography

This might be a tangential Riken’s Links but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve found a few interesting things I’ve wanted to show people so I guess this is the best place to do it.

First up was a really great video of the Trans Siberian Railway that has been matched with Google maps to its location as it travels across the length of the Russian nation. What is pretty great about the Google hosted page linked here, is that you can listen while traveling to the sound of the train, or if you want to put yourself in the position of the traveler, the books on tape of Tolstoy and Gogol. You can start in Moscow and either jump ahead to interesting sections, or travel the length of Siberia until you finally make it in Vladivostok. Also, the videos hosted on Youtube go to an amazingly clear 1080p HD. (Thanks to my brother James)

Next up I have a selection of info-graphics created by some very clever people. Susanna Hertrich has done some great work, but my favorite is one depicting the perception of risk and actual hazards:

Last up is another awesome visualization of the undersea cables that line the ocean’s floor sending the first international telegraphs and hosting current international interweb traffic.

So not long after the post regarding visual representations of complex information, I happened upon Craig Robinson’s collection of baseball related info-graphics. The images explain very simply the central idea behind each graph’s data. This may seem irrelevant as it is merely baseball. I can agree with many out who think that baseball statistics are an overindulgent and essentially meaningless art. The more one parses the numbers, the less relevant they are to the game.

Amazin?

These stats manage to overcome the inherent problems  in things like OBPS. (On Base percentage Plus Slugging average) Naked numbers lack a depth of meaning necessary to understanding why a player or team is capable of winning.

Craig Robinson’s work seems to do away with much of hollowness in his statistics. This strangely colored chart explains who played for the Mets during the fateful 1986 season, but what I find so interesting is how it explains each player’s journey to and away from the World Championship team. One can see the stars aligning, fate taking over and it all starts to make sense. The graphic also explains who was new to baseball and who were veterans, therefore providing a representative range of age and experience.

The only problem obviously is that we can’t appreciate the majestic and timely failings of Bill Buckner. But perhaps that ground ball could use its own info-graphic some day.

Lets move on.

The next two pieces of visual data concern ballpark design, corporate sponsorship, weather possibilities and for the orientation image, the direction in relation to due North the ballpark itself faces.

And last but not least, a simple but powerful representation of baseball’s highest and lowest ticket prices for the 2009 season. Slightly embarrassing to see my Yankees representing the Bernie Madoff factor in baseball but nevertheless, here it is:

In this age of modernity (or thereabouts) we take it for granted that data is represented in the most efficient and assuredly, most visual of manners. Our power point presentations documented the hypothetical (and then very real) invasion of Iraq – our excel spreadsheets improperly, though with a flair for the aesthetically enlightened, organized and presented the market’s capacity for debt trading.

These novel and assuredly clever visualizations of the world’s data do much, but they do lack the elegance of John Thomson Edinburgh’s representations of the world’s rivers and mountains. Each one perfectly scales the length of the waterways, height of the mountains, relative volume of the river, and changes in course of the water.

Though Edinburgh’s illustrations approach art, their proportions, angles, and overall composition are provided purely by the Earth’s various measurements.

The only other representation of facts I have seen that lays out its subject so elegantly is the chart pictured below. It shows Napoleon’s Grand Armee heading towards Moscow in 1812 (represented in red) and the subsequently brutal return trip a year later with only 10,000 of a 422,000 man force.

The thickness represents troop numbers, direction the relative route taken including rivers and cities of importance, the length is scaled in proportional to the campaign’s mileage, and quite interestingly, the temperature face by the invading force is marked along the bottom. One can literally see the huge mass of Napoleon’s men fought not just by the Russians, but by the shear ardor of the required march and the increasingly hostile, frigid air.

There are some who try to keep things interesting in their mapping of data and hopefully, over time, there will be more of them. Over at strange maps, they try to document the most interesting forms of mapping. For words, there is the visual thesaurus, though it is lame having to pay for its features. That can be fixed here.