MeFi Projects

I think we can all agree that web pages today are too colorful, which is why I have created a web component that crushes your images down to crisp, pixel-perfect dithered black and white. This blog post features an interactive demo - dither your own images and party like it is 1985!
posted by AndrewStephens on Jan 19, 2023 - 14 comments

1 minute video showing incredible spread of Covid-19 in the US using county case counts from the NYT. Interactive map is here: https://covid-19-map.leshill.app [more inside]
posted by leshill on Apr 12, 2020 - 0 comments

I wanted to better understand the COVID-19 situation, so I found some open data, wrote some programs to create bar charts and choropleth maps, open-sourced the code, and blogged about it. [more inside]
posted by daveliepmann on Mar 8, 2020 - 3 comments

A set of charts I made with Tableau. Some of them are interactive!
posted by hopeless romantique on Jul 30, 2019 - 2 comments

Political action committees (PACs) obscure which candidates they fund through layers of contributions to intermediary PACs. I built this tool to help untangle those relationship and show how money moves through webs of PACs to political candidates you might not expect. [more inside]
posted by zazerr on Oct 16, 2018 - 5 comments

Thicket is a platform for rigorous thinking. Users can map out political ideas, discover relevant research, and debate policy claims with others. Thicket puts your beliefs about policy in context, connecting them to relevant academic research and to opposing arguments. Thicket is aimed at students, researchers, journalists, and everyone interested in politics and public policy. The intro video is the best place to start. [more inside]
posted by ropeladder on Jan 24, 2018 - 2 comments

This map shows a 5,700-year timelapse of the world's cities being born one-by-one, starting with the first known city, Eridu, in 3700 BC. The data is from one of the coolest academic studies I've come across in a long time, which compiled a comprehensive dataset of the world's cities and their historic populations, from 3700 BC to 2000 AD. [more inside]
posted by mgalka on Jun 20, 2016 - 0 comments

An interactive map pinpointing the locations of everywhere in NYC that a movie was filmed, 2011 - 2013.
posted by mgalka on Apr 2, 2015 - 5 comments

In theory, by looking at the number of bills supported / opposed by a given group, we can estimate its level of engagement and gauge whether events in Congress are working for or against the groups' interests.
posted by argentum on Dec 29, 2014 - 0 comments

The Rob Ford story has been a wild one, but there's so many characters that it's hard to remember them all. I'm a social psychology PhD student studying memes, and I've gotten deep into social network analysis over the past 2 years. Naturally, I decided to find out whether I could apply social network methods to the Rob Ford story. The result is rofo.ca, which displays many of the people, places, events, and phone calls that have shown up in newspapers and police reports. rofo.ca can serve as a complement to Robyn Doolittle's book, Crazy Town, and to the other reporting that has covered Rob Ford.
posted by iandennismiller on Apr 24, 2014 - 5 comments

Data visualizations ported from Processing to Clojure. [more inside]
posted by daveliepmann on Mar 23, 2014 - 0 comments

I have completed a new fun data art project: I translated the ups and downs of the S&P 500 for the year into a reggae-ish song, while an animation represents the data visually and in sync with the music. It's been a record year for the S&P 500 -- and now you can hear it! [more inside]
posted by edlundart on Dec 23, 2013 - 3 comments

I did some data visualization of hockey stats, with a couple blog posts. It's all using 2013 regular season data. [more inside]
posted by rakish_yet_centered on Jun 8, 2013 - 0 comments

An animated data visualization I designed in association with CNNMoney went live this morning. It shows and compares salaries for different people (Kobe Bryant, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a minimum wage worker, a physician, etc), accumulating in real-time for 1 minute. Watch the disparity grow second by second!
posted by edlundart on Apr 5, 2013 - 6 comments

A generative music system that reroutes your keystrokes into a synthesizer before sending them back to what you're writing. Supports multiple instruments & scales, and aims for scriptable composition backends.
posted by tmcw on Nov 2, 2012 - 1 comment

Today you might have noticed Tim Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation (previously) announcing the launch of the Web Index, a global ranking for measuring the benefits and impact of the Web on the world's nations and peoples. If you've visited the website, you might also have played with the visualizations, brought to you by a couple of Mefites.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth on Sep 5, 2012 - 0 comments

With the accompanying infographic-heavy blog post, it does what it says on the tin and more. Tracks your keystrokes, makes beautiful pictures and surprising observations from the data. Open source, and you can download 50 days of my data. [more inside]
posted by tmcw on Feb 14, 2012 - 3 comments

What environmental catastrophe is your neighbor? A map of all 1.6k Superfund sites and an instant finder for your own by using some interesting math hacks.
posted by tmcw on Sep 29, 2011 - 8 comments

A budget transparency visualization for Cook County, IL (Chicago's county) displaying all county departments broken down by fund and control officer from 1993 to 2011. Done as a collaboration with Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey. [more inside]
posted by kakarott999 on Aug 18, 2011 - 2 comments

I made a visualization of the US federal budget for the Data Viz Challenge. [more inside]
posted by -jf- on Apr 10, 2011 - 7 comments

A slowly rotating circular graphic reveals relative weather data for 50 cities across the globe. Cities are organized according to highest average annual temperature, and precipitation levels animate month to month. Mostly just eye candy, I suppose.
posted by edlundart on Mar 7, 2011 - 0 comments

Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to graph Gmail activity over time. You can use it to visualize your communication with friends, your Facebook activity, when you purchased items on Amazon or how often you use certain words or phrases. We provide the same search functionality used by Gmail, but instead of a list of messages we show you graphs of email trends over time. [more inside]
posted by null terminated on Sep 13, 2010 - 0 comments