visualisation

I love me a Wordle. If you're the same and you're interested in some ground-breaking techniques to visualise big data in real-time this video is worth a watch.

Deb Roy's research starts with an experiment to parse 90,000 hours of video to chart his infant son's discovery of language through to analysis of online comments, sentiment and social connections during President Obama's State of the Union address.

This is a fantastic visualisation of 24 hours' worth of tweets across London. It's a great video - and choice material for social media presentations, I'd wager - that brings to life the way information is shared across a geography.

The red dots are the tweets, with the yellow streaks showing the direction of a retweet (RT) from the origin to the destination. Of course, this is just a fraction of the actual volume as most people don't have geolocation turned on.

Q: What happens when you let an intern loose with 10m lines of data and some processing power?

A: In the case of Paul Butler an intern with Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team, something rather special.