William F. Garrity

At Flowing Data, 

5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009

By Nathan / Dec 16, 2009

It was a huge year for data. There's no denying it. Data is about to explode.

Applications sprung up left and right that help you understand your data - your Web traffic, your finances, and your life. There are now online marketplaces that sell data as files or via API. Data.gov launched to provide the public with usable, machine-readable data on a national scale. State and local governments followed, and data availability expands every day.

At the same time, there are now tons of tools that you can use to visualize your data. It's not just Excel anymore, and a lot of it is browser-based. Some of the tools even have aesthetics to boot.

It's exciting times for data, indeed.

Data has been declared sexy, and the rise of the data scientist is here.

With all the new projects this year, it was hard to filter down to the best, but here they are: two honorable mentions and the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Visualizations were chosen based on analysis, aesthetics, and most importantly, how well they told their story (or how well they let you tell yours).

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Two honorable mentions

1. MTV VMA Tweet Tracker
2. Crisis of Credit Visualized

And the Five Best

1. Photosynth
2. The Jobless Rate for People Like You
3. OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits
4. Protovis
5. On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces