Inspired by the remarkable xkcd webcomic visual language, Michael Ogawa created a series of visualizations mapping collaborative efforts of various developers in a variety of tools and programming languages, such as Apache or Python.
Data comes from the project repository logs. Time flows horizontally from left to right. At each timestep (usually a month) developers are clustered by the files they modify. A histogram at the bottom shows the volume and type of file committed. You can mouse-over individual lines to see them better.
The two images shown here display the collaborations between developers of Apache (a popular webserver) during the first two years of planning and documentation of its 2.0 branch."
Url: Visual complexity (08 07 2011)
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Developed by Facebook intern Paul Butler this visualization maps the connections of 10 million Facebook users spread across the globe. Butler took a sample of 10 million pairs of friends from Facebook's Apache Hive database, Facebook's warehouse containing the social graph of 500 million people, and matched them with the corresponding coordinates of each city, connecting them with blue lines.
As Butler explains: "Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle. (...) What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life." "
url: Visual Complexity (08 07 2011)
