Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: When We’ll Forget…
From xkcd comes today’s graphic of choice. It’s a timeline. About when we’ll forget stuff. Although for me this is pretty much a useless concept. Because I’m generally unaware of cultural events when they happen today.
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Olympic Medal Ranking
Read on…: Olympic Medal RankingAs I wrote about last weekend, one can look at the Olympics rankings in a number of different ways. Even without weighting medal counts, one has to decide whether to rank countries by gold medals (as the IOC does) or by total medals (my personal preference). The New York Times looks at both in an interesting ranking chart. The piece…
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Olympic-sized Appetites
Read on…: Olympic-sized AppetitesThe Olympics bring out the best. Well, at least in athletics. In terms of infographics, not always so much. This piece from CNN is a fairly unorganised mess with lots of individual datapoints. It’s a shame to see this at CNN when so many other news outlets are doing quality graphic work for the Olympics.
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Obama Campaign Spending Breakdown
Read on…: Obama Campaign Spending BreakdownOver the weekend, the New York Times looked at how the Obama campaign has been spending its cash. I appreciate the value in these sort of block charts, but, I wonder if a bar chart would not have been more clear for the comparison. I like the block charts when the designer is rearranging the data in different ways. For…
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Weekend Work
Read on…: Weekend WorkHere’s a rare weekend post to showcase some Olympic-related work. The following graphic looks at how the ranking changes for the Top-10 countries if medals are weighted. To me it is ridiculous that Kazakhstan is ranked higher than Russia because Kazakhstan has won 4 gold medals compared to Russia’s 3 when Kazakhstan has a total of 4 medals whereas Russia…
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Olympic Performance vs Economic Performance
Read on…: Olympic Performance vs Economic PerformanceThe Olympics are now fully underway and we can begin to see some patterns about who is doing well and who is, well, not. This infographic has a lot more to say about who had been doing well up through 2008. That is important because that was the last year before the fiscal/financial crisis brought about the first global recession…
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I Can’t Remember the Things I Forgot
Read on…: I Can’t Remember the Things I ForgotThe Leveson Inquiry looked into the whole British phone hacking scandal. And now that it is wrapping up, the BBC looked at what was said. As always, the great thing about inquiries is that nobody can exactly recall what happened when or who said what. And the BBC included that in their infographic.