Health Outcomes Maps

The County Health Rankings website (www.countyhealthrankings.org) ranks the health of people in each county by state.  While this doesn't tell the overall health of people, it shows which counties are healthier, overall, than others in the state.  These interesting maps were created by Forum One, a Web design and communications firm that specializes in socially conscious causes.

In addition to the map, visitors can view the underlying data by county.  This includes data ranging from smoking and binge drinking rates to liquor store density, air pollution days and single parent households.

Visualizing the News

Newsmap.jp pulls data and maps the size of the headline based on how many articles are written about the topic.  The site is customizable by country, type of news, and by period of time.  While not the way I want to get most of my news, it is an interesting way to visualize the news. 

Interestingly this type of visualization would have been nearly impossible 15 years ago.  I remember some students spending hours and hours scouring Lexis-Nexus data to come up with news trends in the mid 1990s... now, it is considered an interesting way to view the news, but few would question that the data is readily at our fingertips.