My Favorite Infographic and Visualization Internet Sites
What we see … depends on what we look for.
Do you have an interest in infographic and visualization design? A critically important skill these days, and quickly growing in importance. Here is an interesting quote from Google chief economist, Hal Varian:
The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it, is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decade.
I could not agree more. To keep up and continuously learn this skill, I have found 5 favorite internet sites that provide tons of new information.
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I will share them and why I like them so much:
Visualizing.org
This site was created by General Electric and Seed Media group. Its goals include:
To make data visualization more accessible to the general public
To promote information literacy through creation and sharing
To provide unique resources to help simplify complex issues through design
The site frequently introduces challenges as competitions to the community on pressing issues of the day. Each data visualization challenge involves everyone working from the same data sets.
Another interesting asset of this site is a very large list of data sets.
Newsviz.org
This site represents a directory of data visualizations used in the news industry. Their goal is to focus on one clearly-defined type of data based graphics. The site accepts submissions from anyone.
The site has great search engine filters to find what you are looking for.
Helpmeviz.com
This interesting site is open to anyone who is searching for feedback on their visualization designs. There is not a better way to learn, is there? All types of visualizations are welcomed.
This data visualization community consists of people who use data and design to tackle a variety of issues and challenges. Great way to facilitate discussion and debate.
World Digital Library (WDL.org)
The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site.
The site is a project of the US Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO).
Their content includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photos, sound recording, and files. It is available free of charge and in multilingual format from all countries and cultures.
It has awesome search filters that include time.
Seealso.org
A collection of favorite projects built on open data from Wikipedia and other Wikipedia projects.
Takeaways
We like to view an infographic as something that tells the stories that its designer wants to explain, but data visualization lets people build their own insights based on the evidence provided. These sites cover both topics very well.
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Quora, and LinkedIn.
