Big data visualization engines for understanding the development of countries, social networks, culture and cities

Big data can be used for more than improving the targeting of marketing campaigns. In this talk I will present five big data visualization engines we have created at the MIT Media Lab's Macro Connections group and will show how we can use big data and visualizations to improve our understanding of the development of economies, cultures and cities. The data visualization engines I will demo include (i) the Observatory of Economic Complexity (atlas.media.mit.edu), which is the most comprehensive tool for exploring international trade data created to date; (ii) DataViva (dataviva.info), which is a tool we created to open up data for the entire formal sector economy of Brazil, including data on all of the working force, municipalities, industries, and occupations of Brazil; (iii) Pantheon (pantheon.media.mit.edu), a dataset and visualization engine we created to explore global patterns of cultural production; (iv) Immersion (immersion.media.mit.edu), which is a tool that inverts the email interface, by focusing it on people rather than messages; and (v) Place Pulse and StreetScore (pulse.media.mit.edu & streetscore.media.mit.edu), which are crowd-sourcing and machine learning tools we have developed to help understand the aesthetic aspects of cities and their evolution.