Friday, October 10, 2008

Links to Data and Information Visualization Resources for Economics, Finance, and the Current Crisis

If you are interested in learning more about data and information visualization, in light of our current economic crisis, take the time to explore the following links. This list is just a start!

(Warning: A few of the links have a political slant, in one way or another.)

Wikipedia: Visual Analytics
Robert Kosara: Eager Eyes
Nathan Yau: Flowing Data
Nathan Yau's post: Great Data Visualization Tells a Great Story
IBM: Many Eyes
"Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis."
Visual Complexity
Meryl.Net: 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources
Death and Taxes 2009 : A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go (from WallStats
: The Art of Information)
Aaron Schiff: 26econ.com
Aaron Schiff's post: Building Interactive Economic Models with Excel
Aaron Schiff's Economic Blog Directory and Rankings
They Rule: Create maps of the interlocking directories of the top US companies from 2004
Hans Rosling and GapMinder
Gapminder World Blog
Hans Roslinger's Gapminder Ted Talk video
Barry Ritholtz: The Big Picture: Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Geopolitics, Technology, and Digital Media
Follow the Oil Money (Interactive chart that provides views of companies, politicians, and relationships)
Presidential Watch 08: A Map of the Political Blogosphere
Enron E-Mail Explorer

Economic Data Resources
Economic Indicators.Gov
Economic Statistics (Whitehouse)
US Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce
The World Bank
The International Money Fund Data and Statistics
World Economic Outlook -- October 2008 Animations
IMF Data Animation, October 2008

4 comments:

Robert Kosara said...

Nice list, and thanks for the link! But you misspelled my name ...

Lynn Marentette said...

Spelling is now fixed!

Kristin said...

Thanks for mentioning Oil Change International. It's a great organization--they work on exposing the cozy connections between Congress and Big Oil.

The interactive database you mention (www.followtheoilmoney.org) is a resource for anyone interested in hard numbers on which representatives accept how much in oil money and from whom–and then how that corresponds to their votes on energy and policy bills. What you’ll find isn’t surprising, but it is pretty interesting.

There’s also another fun tool, an “oily dollar ATM” that, when you enter your zip code, displays a big dollar bill with the member’s photo and how much money they’ve taken from the oil industry. The idea is that anyone can print them out and use them to raise awareness about just how much corruption there really is!

KPinks said...

That Follow the Oil Money tool from Oil Change International is really interesting! I never knew how "oily" my representatives and senators were until this. It's so easy to use to! Oil Change must be really on top of these issues. While research is really important for clean energy, the blocks in Congress have to be overcome as well, and influential oil money is one of them!