Let us now praise data dumps

As someone who deeply appreciates raw data and admires those who wrangle it, I have to give a shoutout to my fellow travelers out there:
  • Big bunches of ripe bananas to the primates over at Infochimps, "a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table—things like a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing." Check out the (still small but interesting) visualization gallery.
  • Swivel, which aims to "make it easy for everyone to collaborate and explore data together — because better informed people make better decisions: in voting booths, in corporate boardrooms and at neighborhood meetings." A worthy undertaking, and the site's getting a lot of press. (Sadly, the graphics it offers are little more than rudimentary.)
Now that I'm an aspiring Tufte, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of these troves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I want to be Jorge Camoes when I grow up.

Portuguese infoviz enthusiast Jorge Camoes has spent the last year and a half writing informed, insightful blog posts on the field, complete with examples and citations. To his credit, he approaches everything -- even the revered work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few -- with loving skepticism. I'm gratified, too, that he seems to agree with me on one central point: Snazzy tools alone don't get you good data visualization. It all comes down to putting serious thought into the project before you plot the first data point. In future posts we'll discuss more of Jorge's ideas. Bem feito, o Sr. Camoes!
Read more

Hype and backlash:
visualizing pop culture trends

Image
Back in 2005, the astute pop-culture chronicler Adam Sternbergh pointed out that a person's opinion of any given entertainment product depends largely on how long they've been aware of it — that is, where the product sits on the sine-wave timeline of public expectations (aka buzz). His findings, in chart form: "Welcome to the undulating curve of shifting expectations—the Heisenbergian principle by which hype determines how much you enjoy a given pop-culture phenomenon. The first-wave audience is pleasantly surprised, but the second-wavers feel let down; then the third wave finds it’s not as bad as they’ve heard—and they’re all watching the exact same show." Almost five years later, this pattern describes just about all our collective experiences. Sports fans, how much sweeter was it to watch the New Orleans Saints come out of nowhere to win the NFC championship than to have seen the Minnesota Vikings do it for the umpteenth time? As for politics, consider the poll
Read more

Critique: NYT unemployment graphics

Image
To illustrate the horrible unemployment numbers announced today ( "employers in the United States have shed about 3.6 million jobs since December 2007" ), the New York Times presents a series of graphics : 1 ) We have a perfectly nice bar chart here: clear, legible, professionally done, all that. This chart tells us two (2) things: what month it is and how many jobs were lost. Surely there is additional info about this two-year stretch that would add depth and meaning (and potentially even yield an epiphany or two!). One suggestion: The story says, "Manufacturers eliminated 207,000 jobs, more than in any year since 1982. The construction industry eliminated 111,000 jobs. And retailers, who were wrapping up their worst holiday shopping season in years, eliminated 45,000 jobs." Segmenting each bar by color to represent the various sectors would show at a glance where the biggest losses were coming from. 2) Again, a perfectly nice fever chart. (I don't mean to min
Read more