Census Data Released, Dissertation Projects Ahoy?

The 2011 census data has been released by the Central Statistics Office today. Details are available at: 
http://cso.ie/en/newsandevents/pressreleases/2012pressreleases/pressreleasethisisireland-highlightsfromcensus2011part1/

The census data gives a great opportunity for doing data analysis and in particular creating visualisations.  The All-Ireland Research Obervatory at Maynooth (http://www.airo.ie/) are already doing a really nice job of this - see http://airomaps.nuim.ie/flexviewer/?config=Census2011.xml - but there is lots left to do.

For inspiration have a look at this TED talk by Jeff Thorp on Making Data More Human http://www.ted.com/talks/jer_thorp_make_data_more_human.html

Other great examples of visualising similar data include:

• Chromaroma (www.chromaroma.com) showing London Underground usage
• FlightPatterns (www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns) that shows flight paths between US cities
• JustLanded (http://http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metacarta-hidden-data.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-twitter-metacarta-hidden-data) that shows international travel harvested from Twitter posts 
• 100SecondworldHistory (http://www.ragtag.http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds//2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/), a visualisation of world history based on located and dated Wikipedia articles.