Stamen is the design / development firm behind Digg Swarm, Digg Stack, and Trulia Hindsight

They’ve recently been doing a lot of work involving map overlays (reference the Trulia project and their work for Move On). One very interesting, but not so “flashy”, visualization (pun intended) that might serve as some inspiration for science visualization is their project for INdigital.

This project combines animated map data with a timeline for visualizing realtime activity in Indiana’s 911 emergency call response system. Entries in the timeline are visually linked with counties through a black line, and sparkline at the bottom summarizes total call volume per hour. The density of points on the timeline graph makes it easy to identify “crisis times”—or times when the system was handling a very high volume of calls.

Combining spatial and temporal data in one visualization is a challenging problem, and I haven’t seen the actual INdesign application to judge how well this one addresses the problem. But this appears to be a promising approach and one that I think has a number of potential applications in science.