The rise of computational methods has generated a new natural resource: data. While it's unclear if big data will open up trillion-dollar markets, it is clear that making sense of data isn't easy, and that data visualizations are essential to squeeze meaning out of data. But the capacity to create data visualizations is not widespread; to help develop it we introduce the Pixel Factory, a new initiative focusing on the creation of data-visualization resources and tools in collaboration with corporate members. Our goals are to create software resources for development of online data-visualization platforms that work with any type of data; and to create these resources as a means to learn. The most valuable outcome of this work will not be the software resources produced, incredible as these could be, but the generation of people with the capacity to make these resources.

FOLD is an authoring and publishing platform for creating modular, multimedia stories. Some readers require greater context to understand complex stories. Using FOLD, authors can search for and add "context cards" to their stories. Context cards can contain videos, maps, tweets, music, interactive visualizations, and more. FOLD also allows authors to link stories together by remixing context cards created by other writers.

Immersion is a visual data experiment that delivers a fresh perspective of your email inbox. Focusing on a people-centric approach rather than the content of the emails, Immersion brings into view an important personal insight—the network of people you are connected to via email, and how it evolves over the course of many years. Given that this experiment deals with data that is extremely private, it is worthwhile to note that when given secure access to your Gmail inbox (which you can revoke any time), Immersion only uses data from email headers and not a single word of any email's subject or body content.

We were not born with the ability to fly, cure disease, or communicate at long distances, but we were born in a society that endows us with these capacities. These capacities are the result of information that has been generated by humans and that humans have been able to embed in tangible and digital objects. This information is all around us: it's the way in which the atoms in an airplane are arranged or the way in which our cellphones whisper dance instructions to electromagnetic waves. Pantheon is a project celebrating the cultural information that endows our species with these fantastic capacities. To celebrate our global cultural heritage, we are compiling, analyzing, and visualizing datasets that can help us understand the process of global cultural development.

PubPub reinvents publication the way the web was designed: collaborative, evolving, and open. We do so in a graphical format that is deliberately simple and allows illustrations and text that are programs as well as static PDFs. The intention is to create an author-driven, distributed alternative to academic journals that is tuned to the dynamic nature of many of our modern experiments and discoveries— replicated, evaluated on-the-fly, and extended as they are used. It is optimized for public discussion and academic journals and is being used for both. It is equally useful for a newsroom to develop a story that is intended for both print and online distribution.

With more than six billion people and 15 billion products, the world economy is anything but simple. The Economic Complexity Observatory is an online tool that helps people explore this complexity by providing tools that can allow decision makers to understand the connections that exist between countries and the myriad of products they produce and/or export. The Economic Complexity Observatory puts at everyone's fingertips the latest analytical tools developed to visualize and quantify the productive structure of countries and their evolution.

Diverse teams of authors are known to generate higher-impact research papers, as measured by their number of citations. But is this because cognitively diverse teams produce higher quality work, which is more likely to get cited and adopted? Or is it because they possess a larger number of social connections through which to distribute their findings? In this project we are mapping the co-authorship networks and the academic diversity of the authors in a large volume of scientific publications to test whether the adoption of papers is explained by cognitive diversity or the size of the network associated with each of these authors. This project will help us understand whether the larger levels of adoption of work generated by diverse groups is the result of higher quality, or better connections.