Mobility Lab’s Data Visualization Hack Day (tomorrow, Saturday, March 23) will bring together programmers with agency representatives and community stakeholders. Our goal is to share both the data we have about regional mobility systems and the tools we use to visualize them.
There’s something about visual information that manages to engage people and fire the imagination. As more agencies release open data, the more opportunities we have. How can we use this data to convey information, and democratize our transportation networks?”
Here’s an example created by Jay Gordon from MIT. His London in Motion video shows how London’s transit system relates to its communities, animating 16 million daily transactions.
Washington’s WMATA system recently created its own video, released on theirPlanItMetro blog. For the first time we got to see how Metrorail, Metrobus, and the Circulator bus sytem form a cohesive system.
Private companies are also getting in the act, and with the ubiquity of GPS-enabled devices, many applications have a map-based component to their data. Foursquare isn’t a transportation company, but its data lights up the street grids of New York City and Tokyo, as seen in the video below.
APIs make it easy for third parties to visualize large datasets. The One Million Tweet Map plots Twitter’s geotagged tweets across the globe. VeloViewer takes biking and jogging trips from Strava‘s API and creates on-the-fly animations. As an avid Flickr user, I’ve created my own Heatmapper tool for mapping Flickr’s geotagged photos.
I started experimenting last year with open data from Capital Bikeshare. One of the more abstract visualizations even made it into an art show. (Details at Variations on Displaying Data.)
For the Data Visualization Hack Day, we’ll share local visualizations and talk to the people who made them. I’ll be sharing more animations I made that crunch data from Capital Bikeshare, and guide people who want to customize the display using their own data and their own styles. You can get a sneak preview at Animating Data with Processing.
Whether you have good data, or just good ideas, please join the conversation!