Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 391

FIGURE 2-5 Distance to McDonald's (2010) by Stephen Von Worley, http://datal.ws/24y

Now it seems like you can find data on almost anything if you look hard
enough. Using a ready-to-use, comma-delimited file, Stephen Von Worley cal-
culated the distance to the nearest McDonald's everywhere in the contiguous
United States and mapped it. As shown in Figure 2-5, the brighter an area, the
less time it'll take to grab a Big Mac.

Even newer, social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, continue to
flourish, which provide a new source of information on what people are talk-
ing about and concerned with. Data is readily accessible via the application
programming interfaces (API). Photo-sharing site Flickr also has an accessible
API. Eric Fischer combined data from Twitter and Flickr in his series of maps
titled See Something or Say Something , shown in Figure 2-6.

FIGURE 2-6 (following page)
See Something or Say Something
(2011) by Eric Fischer,
http://datafl.ws/2ba