10. Asteroid Discovery

Scott Manley of the Armagh Observatory visualized 30 years of asteroid discoveries. It’s a straightforward animation that shows planets and asteroids orbiting the sun, with waves of twinkles as discoveries are made. I especially liked the contrast between human and automated discoveries.

9. Driving Shifts Into Reverse

Hannah Fairfield, former editor for The New York Times, and now graphics director for The Washington Post, had a look at gas prices versus miles driven per capita. The chart could’ve easily been an x-y scatterplot, but the extra step was taken to connect the dots so to speak. Points were ordered by time, and turns were clearly explained graphically.

8. The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

This weekender by Matt McKeon of the IBM Visual Communication Lab explored the changes of Facebook privacy policies over the years. It came right after Facebook had made another update to push for a more public profile. Click on the interactive, and see what becomes public and how many people can see your postings.

7. What Online Marketers Know About You

Along the same privacy lines, this project from Andrew Garcia Philips and Sarah Slobin (plus five data gatherers) of The Wall Street Journal explored what online marketers know about you. I wouldn’t say the visualization itself was super advanced, but thoughtful reporting and company breakdowns really made the whole piece work.

6. Education Nation Scorecard

The Education Nation Scorecard, by Ben Fry-headed Fathom Design, brought together sparse education data, at the national, state, and local level, in a single application. You can easily search for your own school or area to see how it compares to the rest.

5. Nature by Numbers

Nature by Numbers by Cristobal Vila isn’t a typical data visualization piece. It’s more of a demonstration of mathematical concepts, but it’s a beautiful work that must be watched to fully appreciate. You will have a new found appreciate for Fibonacci, guaranteed.

4. Tracking the Oil Spill

The BP oil spill was the center of public attention for a good part of the year, and The New York Times did a great job at keeping us updated on all aspects of the spill. This included where the oil spread, what land areas were affected, and effects on wildlife.

3. Polymaps

JavaScript keeps getting faster and is becoming a viable route (over Flash) for visualization on the Web. Polymaps, by SimpleGeo and Stamen, is an open-source JavaScript mapping library that lets you build interactive maps from scratch. I haven’t had a chance to use Polymaps for a project yet, but I’m looking forward to it, and I am sure we will see a number of Polymaps projects spring up next year.

2. Journalism in the Age of Data

During his Knight Journalism fellowship at Stanford, Geoff McGhee interviewed visualization trendsetters on how they deal and what they do with data in Journalism in the Age of Data. Just about every well-known data practitioner (and their work) is featured in the hour-long video. The focus is on journalism, but the topics apply to all types of visualization.

1. Tourist Maps

We’ve seen maps based on Flickr photos before, but most aren’t much more than pictures on a map. Eric Fischer took the next step and looked for where the tourists flock, all based on data available via the Flickr API. Tourist photos are marked red, local photos are marked blue, and photos where tourism could not be determined were marked yellow. He did this for over 100 major cities in the world.

The end result was maps with pockets of tourists and locals. Visiting somewhere new and want an authentic experience? Maybe head towards the blue.

Fischer also had a fine series on race and ethnicity.

And there you have it. Those are my top ten picks for 2010. It was tough ranking all of them, as many of these could’ve placed top honors on a different day. What are your picks for the year?

Please take 11 minutes out of your day to appreciate [part of] Jonathan Jarvis‘s Master’s thesis, “The Crisis of Credit Visualized.” Jarvis is a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. May his grad school debt vanish with great haste.

The context:

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here.

Visualization was also a part of my Master’s thesis, though only in theory.

“In Radiohead’s new video for ‘House of Cards,’ no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects,” according to the band’s YouTube channel.

After hearing about Radiohead’s first-of-its kind video, Google:

[A]greed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing… You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget – all at http://code.google.com/radiohead.

Radiohead – ‘House of Cards’

Watch The Making of ‘House of Cards” below:

“[T]he data (although not the music) used to produce this music video are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site,” according to Creative Commons board member Joi Ito. “This combination of Open Source licenses for code and Creative Commons licenses for data/content is very “good idea”…. Thanks to Aaron Koblin (the guy who wrote the code), Radiohead, Warner-Chappell and DeWitt Clinton and his team at Google for taking the lead on this.”

Also, In Rainbows is streaming for free at Last.Fm.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Warner/Chappell Music, Radiohead’s publisher