With Apps for America 2 we wanted to give a special prize to the best visualization. Part of the reson why is because we think that building up the art community inside of Sunlight Labs is a priority and just as important to our mission as the development community. The other reason is because the only way to make big data accessible to people is often by presenting simple, easy to understand visualizations.

This round’s visualization prize is going to QuakeSpotter.org, a great visualization of Earthquakes across the world. The cross platform desktop app helps visualize where earthquakes are happening and searches Twitter around the earthquake to see tweets mentioning it.

The app itself was built in Ruby Processing. And it is a beautiful visualization. Check it out for yourself. There’s a Windows, Mac and Linux version available.

Congratulations to Quakespotter!