brought to you by the letter j
Posts tagged as:
LOST is back tonight! And what better way to prepare than an interactive timeline from the excellent NYT graphics team? A good infographic should communicate otherwise-complex ideas in a simple and intuitive manner… oh, never mind, LOST is back and that’s really what matters. Check out the timeline here!
{ 0 comments }
Very amusing… and true:
I especially love “The HDR Hole.” Presumably the y-axis is measured in percent of personal potential… there must be all sorts of Bayesian self-reflection stuff going on there.
(Via DataViz)
{ 0 comments }
The NYT has published an infographic showing the top recipe searches on Allrecipes.com. Searches are broken out by state, allowing some interesting comparisons. (Local dialects and preferences are an interest of mine, and when combined with maps I can’t resist… see also various words for soda.)
Here’s the chart for “apple pie”, the 5th most popular search. Purple states had above-average search volume; orange states were below:
It’s not a particularly even distribution – and sent me looking for a Thanksgiving dish that was more uniformly enjoyed by all Americans. Unsurprisingly, that turned out to be “turkey,” the 14th most popular search. It’s graphic was a blend of muted purples and oranges, dispersed unevenly among the nation’s geography:
From there, I went searching for hyperlocal dishes or specialties. This would be much easier with the raw data, as a simple statistical test for dispersion and geographic correlation would toss up the winners – but it’s a testament to the NYT’s excellent graphics team that their visual maps serve the purpose just as well.
First up, sweet potatoes. The #1 search in the country was “sweet potato casserole,” with most of the searches concentrated in the southeast:
Clocking in at #15 was “sweet potato pie,” another another – even more strongly – southeast favorite:
Interestingly, though, sweet potatoes themselves formed a pretty uniform search pattern across the states – and, after turkey, get my vote for “most American dish”:
The dataset reveals two interesting facts about sweet potatoes. First, some people don’t spell too good:
Second, there’s a vocabulary difference, as many people out west prefer to call their sweet potatoes “yams” (I can’t back that up empirically, as they might want actual yams, but there is enough of a difference in dialect that many “yams” sold in the United States are required to state that they are also sweet potatoes on their packaging):
Moving on from those delicious root vegetables to another family, corn, reveals further geographic breakdowns. Here’s Midwestern favorite #18, corn casserole:
# 27: corn pudding, popular in the mid-Atlantic… and Alaska:
and #31 cornbread dressing in the south:
Meanwhile, new England likes its butternut squash:
By this point, you’re better off clicking through the actual graphic than staring at my reprints… I hope that all of TGR’s American readers had a happy Thanksgiving, regardless of what was on the table.
{ 0 comments }
An interesting visualization of Twitter as 100 people is a good take on a popular infographic meme, but reveals a few inconvenient truths about these sorts of images.
Firstly, although I am (not so) secretly pleased to see this illustration of Twitter’s non-inclusive communicative nature let’s not forget that Twitter, like so many other social phenomena, follows a power law distribution. We’ve all heard a lot about the “long tail” – here it is in action.
Second, “100 people” visualizations, or any display of percentages, need to have exclusive categories to work well; otherwise they may not add up to 100%. In this case, are the “5 loud mouths” really different people from the 5 with more than 100 followers? And couldn’t one of the users with many followers also be a lazy account? These overlaps create issues in the discrete presentation of demographic groups. If the groups really are exclusive – which in this case would have to be by chance rather than by design – then the graphic works well.
Finally, more of a nitpick than anything else: if Twitter were a community of 100 people, then how could anyone have more than 100 followers? Obviously, the number refers to the true Twitter population, but it’s incongruous with the graphic. One option is to scale 100 people down to this sub-community, but then the figure would lose its impact, for the scaled version of 100 users would be just .0024 (based on a true population of 4,200,000 Twitter users). A second option is to abandon the “100 people” metaphor and go with a percentage-based pie chart, but that would ruin the appeal of the infographic.
For a truly excellent set of “100 people” visualizations, see Toby Ng’s collection.
{ 0 comments }
Add it to the list of things you didn’t even realize you were missing – here’s a stunning infographic about butter:
http://www.vimeo.com/4941611(via information aesthetics)
{ 0 comments }