David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

Attached is the June 2010 edition of the Integrated Visualization and Analytics Community (iVAC) Newsletter. The Basic/Futures Research (BFR) Program believes that regular communication is one of the most effective ways to enable our Data and Visual Analytics enterprise to flourish.

The iVAC Newsletter is envisioned as a coordinating function for the various activities coming out of the BFR program, international university partners and other government agencies.

The thought is to present and share knowledge of these initiatives, accomplishments in various areas (technology, publications, new funding, etc.), up-coming conferences and events, and other significant happenings to the entire community.

One of the main Visual Analytics characteristics is the tight integration between automatic computation and interactive visualization. This generally corresponds to the availability of complex and powerful algorithms that allow for manipulating the data under analysis, transforming it in order to feed suitable visualizations. As an example, some Visual Analytics tools devoted to text analysis are based on the idea of extracting new data from the text (e.g., computing word frequencies or paragraph lengths) in order to produce visualizations that are based on these new derived pieces of information.