I discovered some interesting data visualization projects today by exploring the links gathered by Max Kiesler at Design Label. Some highlights below:

For quite a while, I’ve been thinking about creating a tool that allows users to make and share multimedia, interactive timelines easily. Turns out, the folks at CircaVie (owned by AOL) have done exactly that. (They might want to work on a better name.) This is like ManyEyes, but specifically for timelines. Although it sells the concept as a way to create personal timelines of your life, it looks like users are using it to explore a variety of themes, especially historical and political issues. Very nicely designed interface, and they also allow you to log in with AIM or OpenID, which is a nice touch.

I find this both exciting and creepy: Slife tracks everything you do on your computer and gives you a visualization of how you’re using your time, including time spent in applications, emails sent, websites visited, etc. Go ahead, be your own Big Brother!

Chris Jordan’s awe-inspiring imagery depicting statistical facts, such as a print of 426,000 cell phones (the number of phones discarded in the U.S. daily).

Chris Harrison’s Word Association Spectrum diagrams, showing the frequency of subsequent word occurrences for pairs of opposites, such as “war” and “peace” or “kid” and “adult”. I teeter back and forth about whether this actually communicates anything or just looks cool, but it’s certainly a worthwhile experiment.

An interesting approach to using data visualization for a CV or résumé.

Tweet Volume: See how often various words and phrases appear on Twitter

Stephen Anderson’s poster visualizing the process of “Classifying, Sorting, and Labeling Experiences”

Finally, a new (to me) data viz tool: Flare is a set of ActionScript 3 classes for creating charts, graphs, treemaps, etc;