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Nicholas Felton is a graphic artist, designer, and creator of BikeCycle, a data visualization set which plots activity from a bike sharing program in New York City. The information was gathered over the duration of a year and updates in real time to correspond to the same date and time of 2014 when the information was gathered. This sort of delayed but real-time data visualization is effective not only in representing the locations of particular events or paths, but it also allows for a much deeper analysis of data because it is separates information into an accurate timeline, allowing viewers to perceive changes in activity over time. The advantage of utilizing such a means of visualization over more regular representational methods is that rental bike use can be related to time of day, time of year, and other factors, data which would otherwise be lost in the quagmire of conventionally compiled data sets.
I admire this project because it takes something which appears on the surface to be intrinsically two-dimensional and static and turns it into something more that is dynamic and even more informative than the standard model for data mapping. I expect that the points are placed over a static map of New York City and that the points of an array which correspond to certain times of day are called and plotted as the time and date changes.