Mapping data over time can be challenging, especially when you have a lot of data to load in the beginning. Torque, the new open source project by CartoDB, is a step towards making the process easier.
Torque allows you to create beautiful visualizations with big temporal datasets by bundling HTML5 browser rendering technologies with a generic and efficient temporal data transfer format created using the CartoDB SQL API. Torque visualisations work on desktop and ipads, and work well on temporal datasets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of datapoints.
It's still in the early stages but should be one to keep an eye on.
Check out this map for a sense of what Torque can help you do. The map animates historical edits to OpenStreetMap in Madrid. Also this. [Thanks, Carlos]
In case you're interested in learning how much you suck at US state geography, here's a game to help. The goal is to match up states on the blank country map, and you end with an average error in miles. I did not do well. [via kottke]
Jeffrey Heer on visualization for interactive exploration:
We were visualizing the results of a chain of models, including text modeling and dimensionality reduction. These models can sometimes give rise to misleading results, which we then spotted in the visualization. This result led us to consider how visualizations must do more than just turn data into images — it is vital that visualizations support interactive exploration and verification, so that one can not only uncover new hypotheses but begin the process of assessing their credibility. Another result of this work is that the insights gained from the visualizations enabled us to design better machine learning methods, such that our mathematical models of textual similarity better matched the judgments of human experts.
The rest of the Scientific American article is worth reading, mostly for the other quotes from Heer and Ben Shneiderman.
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