I wanted to post about these amazing visu­al­iza­tions of links between people and orga­ni­za­tions in the New York Times. But in the course of looking up their author I dis­cov­ered that almost every­thing he creates is that or more amazing, which makes it dif­fi­cult to choose one example to high­light. Nonetheless, here’s the 1984 version of the NYT viz:

Check it out large, or see the whole set.

Jer Thorp appar­ently works by visu­al­izing the output of data mining executed on publicly avail­able data streams. He mostly uses Processing to do it, which he calls “an elec­tronic sketch­book for devel­oping ideas”. Interesting. Using infor­ma­tion tech­niques to digest and syn­er­gize the increasing amount of public (spatial) data sets is becoming a natural part of GIS, and if I were a more ambi­tious pro­grammer I might be inspired by this stuff to try and use Processing in a spatial context.

(Also, he appears to have good taste in neigh­bour­hoods.)