1. I popped over to Iowa just before the causus in January to play with some data for one of the presidential candidates. One thing that has always irritated me is how difficult for most people to get access to a decent map of data.

    We were looking forward to the causus and how it might turn out, based on campaign data and trends. We were interested in running some scenarios by precinct and looking at the results by county. A table is the usual way to do this, but it is 100 times easier to visualise and understand the data if it is laid out on a map.

    Usually I would have used a GIS program, but I was using a laptop where I can't install programs and i had 24 hours in Iowa to visualise some data and leave a tool there for the campaign to use on election night.

    Here's what I built ... in Excel.
    Not perfect, but fun :)

    The excel tool allows you to slot in data of your own and see the map of it. I actually built it to allow EASY customisation by state, so that it could be used for the rest of the primaries. But it both wasn't as easy to use as I thought it was and people on the campaign actually had better things to do than to play with Excel, so it was only used in Iowa. Oh well!

    The map layout was inspired by http://www.style.org/iowacaucus/

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  2. Word from information aesthetics on a great tool from some nerds that does something I'm amazed Gmail hasn't done for you: provide visualisation of your emails.
    an IMAP-based email analysis project, which generates tables, graphs & visual distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, & so on.

    graphs include distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week & time of day, distribution of messages by size & the top 40 largest messages, the top senders, recipients & mailing lists subscribed, distributions of senders, recipients & mailing lists over time, & the distribution of thread lengths.

    Get it here. I spent about an hour and couldn't get it to work. That doesn't make it not exciting though! I'm sure a .exe version or an official Gmail version will be around the corner ... I have 92,705 emails in my Gmail going back as far as 2000, so this would be a pretty amazing tool. [How? By transferring my old Outlook archives using LimitNone's fantastic little application]
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