Data visualisation

Originally seen on The Guardian

(MASSIVE DORK ALERT...) I've got a thing for data. Basically because it can be used to describe so much in such an ordered way (playing to my OCD there). From my time as an Actionscript developer, I was gripped by Object-Oriented Programming and how almost anything can be described as objects with properties.

Visualising data is something I do by nature now, whenever I start a process of system design. Even little things like the little application I programmed at the weekend, started with me thinking "what is involved in this application, what properties do they need to have, and what do they ned to do?". An example is a restaurant menu system: meals are objects, with properties such as price, type (vegetarian for example). Customers are objects with properties such as 'Has Ordered', and methods such as "Order meal X".

This collection of data visualisations is sometimes beautiful, sometimes enlightening. Like the visualisation of Beethoven's 5th Symphony below:

Seeing the relationships between artists on this site has helped me find new ones I like when I've used it:

Given that I'm such a sucker for the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio, I guess it should be no surprise to me that nature (in this case us, our creations, our habits, our new digital societies such as Twitter) should demonstrate curves and trends of the sort you might find in nature itself.