I find it hard to stay away from compelling data visualization. That’s probably a big part of why I’m passionate about government information. The connection isn’t entirely clear to me, but it goes something like this: digital analysis of information illuminates subtle connections and trends that would have gone otherwise unnoticed. New details and understandings encourage everything we with our awareness: creativity, accountability, efficiency, better public policy, depending on what sphere’s data we’re analyzing.
This image, for example, was created by flickr user jbum, combining all of the images on flickr tagged breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and positioning them on a chart representing a day. The result is a pretty stunning view of when people eat each day, or at least of the times marked down by their cameras when they take mealtime pictures.

Data visualizations’ effects reach well beyond the aesthetically creative, as this post observes:

Transparent recycling bins in Shibuya station.

The extent that transparency of what is disposed changes consumption habits. to what extent is a consumer less likely to buy products with a social stigma such as a pornographic magazine or more virtuous products when the act of consumption and disposal is transparent?

It seems that encouraging public awareness has an effect on incentive structures, even outside the public sector, even with respect to garbage bag design.

A more clearly compelling example of public information presented graphically would be Sunlight Labs’ earmark visualization project, which demonstrates spending allocation priorities much more effectively than text. Simple data sets have greater public appeal when presented visually.

Digital analysis can also lead to new types of connections and data sets, built on newer tools that have a semantic component, utilizing languages like RDF, natural language processing, or other complex analysis methods, like topic maps.

Some robust news collection tools that are developing semantic components include textmap.com, featuring ambitiously detailed relationship processing (click around there–very interesting stuff), or daylife.com, with a pleasing interface to semantically sorted news items.

Even with a more limited semantic component, however, the broader adoption web 2.0 style data presentation will ensure that basic political information is better diffused throughout society. For a pertinent example, see this Utah blogger who has taken OpenCongress.org’s tools, combined them in widgetbox, and used them to create a “blidget” (portmanteau of blog and widget) featuring their representatives’ latest votes. Very cool.