I have become a fan of Edward Tufte ~ he suggests that newspapers, like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, are light years ahead of social science in their ability to communicate large amounts of data in straightforward, comprehensible, and aesthetically pleasing ways. Here is an example of a simple kind of data (number of households mail is being delivered to) that over time illustrate the resurrection of New Orleans after Katrina. One could have used any uniform service to accomplish the same thing, but a mailing address exists whether any mail is actually delivered and does not differentiate people by class or race (like telephone or power service might).
There are any number of applications to evaluation for this particular data display, but it illustrates more generally ways to show the adoption or spread of something in geographic space.
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