The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House has launched an online project on Australian Federal Election Speeches.

The website includes the complete text of campaign speeches from 1901-2010. The speeches are organised chronologically for browsing and are keyword searchable. Context is provided by short biographical pieces and summaries of election results.

Santiago Ortiz, a freelance designer in data visualisation, has created a new project titled the 'Data Visualization References Network'.

The project provides a visualised network of practioners in data visualisation for front end users to connect to. On the site, Ortiz explains that the aim of the tool is to enable the discovery of amazing and useful contents from the Infovis field.

The tool provides two views: a networked view of all resources, and a reduced view when 3 or more 'nodes' are selected.

With the current global emphasis on sharing research data with the public, you might wonder - what can the public actually do with data? How can they access it, understand it, or apply it? Why might it be of interest to them, or you?

Data journalism, simply put, is journalism using data - journalism about data, and journalism that draws on data. Data can assist to tell a complex story with infographics that illustrate and interpret the wealth of digital data now available.

The Guardian has made all the data it has reported in the Data Blog available for download.

Visualisation has become the data management buzzword du jour.

Could these be the best data visualization projects of 2011?

We probably all know the periodic table of the elements. The display format lends itself to other uses - hence this periodic table of visualisation elements.

Governments worldwide are starting to crack open their data vaults and let users rummage inside.