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EJ Fox teamed up with Mother Jones magazine, known for their fearless journalism, to visualize both the scale and connections between Super PACs in the 2012 election. Data came from NYT’s Campaign Finance API and Mother Jones’ research department. We worked carefully to highlight interesting stories, but let the user explore individual PACs and connections that interest them.

When GOOD Magazine requested a submission for their Data Issue (Nov 2011), Paul worked with Visual.ly to analyze the growth of private API releases and government open data initiatives around the world over the past 5 & 1/2 years. Data provided by ProgrammableWeb.com and original research.

Michael Porath took on the challenge to convert a Wikipedia page into an interactive visualization. Manifest Destiny portrays the territorial evolution of the United States from 1790 to the present, covering important milestones such as the Louisiana Purchase or the Civil War. Using GIS software Michael hand-crafted 141 maps of the US by hand and turned them into data. Because we care about the Open Web at Mainstem, the maps are now freely available for download under Creative Commons.

Visualization is our craft, and data is our medium. We are developing our own custom tools to hone our craft and push our limits.

Tributary is a custom-built suite of tools for rapidly prototyping visualizations directly in the browser. It's built on the fundamental principle of play, which helps developers work intuitively and discover unexpected ideas. We use Tributary both in our own work and as a platform for sharing and teaching visualization techniques.