Photographs From Hurricane Sandy, Visualized

Source: http://gizmodo.com/photographs-from-hurricane-sandy-visualized-655520772

This might look like your car's speedometer, but it is in fact a clever visualization of photographs taken during Hurricane Sandy last year.

Part of a Digital Humanities project called Phototrails, the radial plot shows 23,581 photos uploaded to Instagram in Brooklyn area during Hurricane Sandy between November 29th and 30th of last year. The team behind the images explains:

Photo’s distance from the center (radius) corresponds to its mean hue; photo’s angle (i.e. the position along the perimeter) corresponds to its time stamp. Note the demarcation line that reveals the moment of a power outage in the area and indicates the intensity of the shared experience (dramatic decrease in the number of photos, and their darker colors to the right of the line).

That's a pretty neat artefact, even if it is one from a horrible and awful time. There's plenty more where that came from, though: the team has a variety of visualization methods which use radial, grid-like and even graphing techniques to tease out interesting trends form the images. Go check them out on the Phototrails site. [Phototrails via Information Aesthetics]