data visualization

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues that networking should be rethought around named data rather than host-to-host conversations. He contrasts the circuit and datagram views of the internet and sketches content-centric networking as a replacement for the location-centric TCP/IP model.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

The secret project cutscene for The Planetary Datalinks from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, featuring a quote about free information flow as the safeguard against tyranny.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor on organ, shown with a Music Animation Machine bar-graph score instead of traditional notation.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

A one-minute clip from SSI showing its Quad shredder destroying computer hard drives and electronic scrap.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

'Pipe Dream' is the best-known piece from the first Animusic DVD, a computer-animated music video in which fantastical machines play music. The animation is driven by MIDI data.

A satirical Onion news segment announcing a Google feature that lets users opt out of Google's data collection by moving to a remote village without Google products or sunlight.

A short 2009 amateur video showing an HP MediaSmart webcam whose face tracking follows a white face but fails to track a black face. The uploader presents it as humorous.

A short video of Venetian Snares' track 'Vache' with the Renoise tracker sequencer data scrolling past, uploaded by the artist in 2006 as a demo of the software.

A short animation illustrating the proposed nanofactory concept, where nanomachines assemble atomically precise parts into larger products. It depicts how such a system might build macroscopic goods from raw materials and energy.