More Data Visualization Goodness

Tags:data visualization, Wikipedia, world history.

I dig the idea behind how this is built. Wikipedia isn’t the end-all-be-all source of infallible information, but it certainly provides great snapshot overviews on any topic. Why not look to it for a historical snapshot? This visualization is beautifully executed, both visually and technically. The creators’ description provides more details below the video.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/

Circle Calendar

Tags:circle calendar, design.

I came across this circle calendar template someone created in Google docs. Unfortunately it’s hard to add dates in digitally, but worth finding a printer if you’re doing some long-term planning. Good design can make even the most familiar things more interesting.

The Hidden Data Trail

Tags:data, social media.

I use Google Docs frequently, especially for collaborative projects, and I have what seems like a gazillion of them organized into collections in my account. Many of the docs shared with have long been inactive, but I keep them around because I’ve forgotten they exist. I’m not alone in this habit, and it makes for an interesting data trail.

Social network sharing has quickly become a daily habit for many, but most are self-aware, if not self-censoring, about what they post. We post things we expect an audience to see, whether it’s global or restricted. In a way it’s like performing on stage, where you can gauge audience reactions, often receiving instant feedback and adjusting accordingly.

The social part of “social media” implies that we know we’re being watched, and recognize a few of the faces in the crowd. You can learn a decent amount about a person by their social media activity, but it’s more like watching a rehearsed speech than witnessing an improvised performance.

Over time, the most mundane moments can become the most significant. So much subtle data is stored in emails and shared documents. Those are the interactions we engage in more casually, where we let our guard down more quickly, where more of our core self surfaces. Moments when we forget there’s an audience are what make candid photographs so compelling.

When Facebook relaunched their inbox, I was shown a message I sent five years ago that I didn’t remember composing. What will I have forgotten in 20 years? Services like MemoLane address this question by pulling social media streams into an explorable timeline. It may be fascinating to scroll through timelines made public by people who’ve used social media since childhood (or before, if they have parents who shared their ultrasound on Facebook).

In the Analog Ages, private thoughts to friends and notes to coworkers were communicated via letter or memo. Books of correspondence between remarkable people have been published as insights into who they were and how they thought. Tools like email, chat and shared documents contain a wealth of personal subtleties, habits, quirks and patterns that might not surface so readily our publicly shared statuses. Future biographers will have an impressively overwhelming amount of resources to draw upon.

Photo by Jenny Downing

Rent vs Buy Data Visualization

Tags:data visualization, New York CIty, real estate, rent, Trulia.

Trulia released this nifty interactive visualization addressing the question of whether it’s better to rent or to buy. The extreme size and redness of New York makes me chuckle. It’s a city filled with outliers, which is one of many quirks I love about it.

Eliminating Zero as a Data Point

Tags:automation, data, FitBit, technology.

Data from a day of activity. Note the awkward timing - I was in a different time zone and didn't update my account, another feature that would be better automated.

It goes without saying that I’m a bit of a data geek. I like data recording to be automated, though, so for the past month or so, I’ve been trying out FitBit. FitBit is a small, wearable device that tracks your steps and activity level throughout the day and wirelessly syncs it to an online account for analysis and tracking. In other words, it’s a glorified pedometer.

I like the idea of FitBit’s automation, that with no effort my data is recorded and transformed into aesthetically pleasing charts and graphs. Data visualization rocks, but seeing some data makes me want to see more data.

FitBit encourages this, too. The ‘tracker’ tab lets users log metrics including food, weight, heart rate, blood pressure and glucose. That’s great for people who already keep tabs on these regularly, but it’s not in my nature to be that methodical. I’d love to keep track of any of those data points, but I’m as likely to remember logging them as I am to keep a mental tally of every step throughout the day.

The result is the above dashboard, which calculates the number of calories burned but offers a mere zero for calories eaten and any other data point. Zero isn’t useful and I’d rather not see it if it can’t be tracked automatically.

I’m not alone in craving automation for increased data collection. Were there a tested device that could track these missing data points for me, I’d be thrilled to give it a try. Information visualization is awesome, but zero is a bit of a killjoy. I look forward to more advanced technology that can eliminate the zeros in my data sets.