stills, animations or both?

hmmn... as of now contented with something algorithmic-ky type..
id say stills and animations .. so both.

... i wanted to dig and gather lots and lots of data for my studio proj.. then present them in a way theyre not overwhelming nor incomprehensible to my crits...

thanks

you can do this with so many tools

have you looked at this website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

maybe you can figure out what kind of presentation you want and then figure out what you need to use to make it

are there tools in particular that you are considering?

like pie charts?

have you tried Excel? The graphing ability is a lot more powerful than what most people typically get out of it.

Unless you are looking for GIS types of capability.

@jmanganelli... yeah have looked at your link, they have good stuff in there.
visually, im thinking of maybe cartography type, or anything appealing beyond the usual 2d pie charts.
@rusty thanks. ill look into your excel suggestion. tnx. oh and by the way, currently attending GIS class, learning process will take a quarter-long.

lots of free programs i discovered. Gephi looks promising also

do you want to link spreadsheets and/or databases to an app and have transform the data into visualizations by setting up data parsing rules and procedures that you design to achieve a look?

or will you be manually designing the graphics and entering the data?

from what you've mentioned so far, have you looked at
http://www.processing.org/

mostly likely excel will be a given no matter what other tools you use

you can also map data with rhino+grasshopper hooked up to excel, ecotect, live sensors, etc

for live, interactive and animated data visualization, there is also touch designer http://www.derivative.ca/

and adobe flash, illustrator, photoshop, and microsoft visio

gephi looks cool, i had not heard of that --- it reminds me of something else but i cannot think of it right now

@oldfogey.. cool samples you got in there ;)