Best Data Visualisations Highlighted

8/4/2015

Best Data Visualisations Highlighted

The Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards selects the best data visualisations, infographics, and information art. Created in 2012 by David McCandless and Aziz Cami, the Awards were created to celebrate the beauty and excellence of visualizing data. The organization also hosts mini-challenges throughout the year to “keep your dataviz juices flowing.” They are community-driven, do not require a large entry fee and provides a free award party sponsored by Kantar . Readers can sort through the winners of the past three year by the different levels and categories.

data viz of unique words used within artist’s first 35,000 lyrics

Using token analysis, he compared the first 35,000 words of lyrics of rappers to the first 35,000 written by Shakespeare and Herman Melville. Shakespeare, he explains, used 28,829 words in his writings and estimates he knew over 100,000. On top of the 85 artists is Aesop Rock with 7,392 unique words. The bottom is DMX with 3,214. The Awards second place or Silver as the site calls it, was Timm Kekeritz’s Weather Radials , which breaks down the weather for 35 cities worldwide. The Bronze was taken by The Depth of the Problem by The Washington Post , illustrating the challenge of searchers looking for wreckage of Flight 370. With over 100 entries for 2014, the Awards are sure to continue celebrating the best data visualisation available.

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Data Analytics finds Most Pleasant Places in the United States

7/14/2015

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Data Analytics finds Most Pleasant Places in the United States

Tired of experiencing cold and soggy weather conditions while travel around the United States, designer and software engineer, Kelly Norton, decided to use data analysis in order to find where the beautiful weather was hiding. Using NOAA Global Summary of the Day data archive , he created a data visualizations tool illustrating The Pleasant Places to Live . Defining “pleasant” as areas with temperatures between 45°F and 85°F with little to no snow or rain, Norton literally mapped out the past 23 years of the weather in the U. S.

Data analytics, the process of examining raw data to find conclusions, were used to decipher the data into an interactive identifying the five most pleasant and five least pleasant places in the country. Incorporating cities in a series of circles, the reader can hover over any circle to find the location identified, the number of pleasant days per year, and in which months those days fell. Users may also enter a zip code to find a location.

Southern California swept the five most pleasant places with Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, Simi Valley, and San Francisco respectively. The least pleasant places are more scatter, located in Montana (twice), Nevada, Wyoming and California.

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