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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!
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Alex Lundry, Vice President and Director of Research of the consulting firm Target Point, has published a brief talk called Chart Wars which is simply brilliant, serving as an excellent but brief (5 minutes!) overview of how easy it is to manipulate infographics and what tricks to be wary of. His specific focus is a chart (which was covered on TGR previously) whose designs – and it went through many iterations – were politically motivated. While there is no doubt about which charts are more clear, his implicit question – which charts are right? – resonates philosophically.
Here’s the video of his talk:
(Via Information Aesthetics)
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We all know that you can get some funny/interesting responses by typing the first part of a question into a major search engine’s search box and letting it suggest the remainder. The NYT has gone so far as to investigate those suggestions themselves. I particularly enjoyed their description of search engines as “modern confessionals:”
This labor-saving device — part fortuneteller, part shrink? — has opened a window into our collective soul. With millions of people pouring their hearts into this modern-day confessional, we get a direct, if mysterious, glimpse into the heads of our fellow Web surfers.
And some nice visualizations of the questions people are asking don’t hurt, either:
I’d love to see an interactive tool for creating these diagrams.
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We’ve come a long way since Powers of Ten…
(Also see the AMNH videos that this one is responding to for some more amazing visualizations.)
(via Infosthetics)
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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.
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It’s been a while since I posted a video for the futurist set, so here we go: (This one is a commercial production for Freeband, heavy on the infographics and benefits of smart networking with a pinch of cheesiness. Sign me up.)
http://www.vimeo.com/7459305(via Datavisualization.ch)
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Finally, a radial visualization which serves a purpose rather than just looking cool. Getting Genetics Done has a tutorial on using clustering functions in R. In it, they show how this this analysis:
is much better represented like this:
There’s nothing wrong with making a chart which looks good – in fact it’s encouraged - so long as the visual niceties enhance the message of the graphic. Radial graphics are all the rage these days, but they rarely help with information communication (and in many cases they detract!). It’s nice to see a truly constructive application of the technique.
(via Revolutions)
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John Maeda has written an article for the MIT Technology Review about Processing, the open source visualization language. It’s a very interesting look into the story behind the code. Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and was once the director of MIT’s Media Lab, where Processing was born.
Lately, I’ve noticed a growing number of Processing-based visualizations (often of tweet data), as more and more people discover the easy but powerful language. Its syntax is very similar to JavaScript (it’s basically Java + graphics) and even someone like me, without much Java experience, can pick it up and be coding in no time.
For those without the time to read the article in full (though it’s short, and I encourage you to), the conclusion is my favorite part:
Programming in general eventually gets hard; you have to embrace the mathematics at some point in the game. But there’s nothing like inspiration as a motivator. Just the other day, I had an e-mail conversation with graphics guru Robert Hodgin, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, we don’t have much mathematics training to speak of, and Roger left without much algorithmic know-how. But he is now extremely skilled with a sophisticated mathematical repertoire, because he has made the leap from pigments and straightedges to numbers and relational symbols. He wanted to learn what at first was hard. In the end, it’s just work. And artists know how to work!
Processing was written and developed by two boys next door who are also visual and computational geniuses. Fry and Reas wrote it for themselves–and also for the world at large, to help everyone share in the rich vocabulary of computational expression. Processing exemplifies my core belief about education today: let the new generation do their thing and just get out of their way. Download it today, and play.
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A very nice graphic is making the rounds (though I believe it originated in a 2007 issue of Time Magazine) which shows Manhattan’s population density by day and by night. The difference is striking:
Happily, the density bars mimic the placement of Manhattan’s skyscrapers – this follows because obviously the tallest buildings support the highest population density. What’s striking, however, is the breakdown – commercial buildings are indicated in the “day” graph and residential buildings in the “night” graph.
This means the building categories can be identified merely by time rather than any other dimension. Ordinarily, asking someone to pick out whether a building was primarily commercial or residential would probably involve a study of tenants or usage. Here we see that merely counting the daily/nightly inhabitants suffices: a clever use of data to avoid an otherwise grueling task.
Aside, the density heights have clearly been scaled for dramatic purposes. This means the two panes are not intuitively comparable; for example the daytime population seems much higher than the nighttime. While there’s certainly more people working in the city than living in it, the exponential scaling makes it difficult to see just big a difference there is.
(via Kenny Herman)
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A visualization from GOOD of the top 10 trade-ins and new vehicles under the “Cash for Clunkers” program reveals an interesting fact:
The top 10 trade-ins include 5 Fords, 2 Chevys, 2 Jeeps and a Dodge. You might recognize those names – they used to be powerhouse American brands.
Meanwhile, the top 10 new cars include just 1 each of Chevy, Dodge and Hyundai, 2 Fords, 2 Hondas and 3 Toyotas – quite a different composition. In particular, Toyota and Honda hold 4 out of the top 5 spots.
Discuss.
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