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How Many Times Has Dr Who Travelled In Time?

Timetravel in popular film and tv

Every single Dr Who journey ever. Crowdsourced ultra-geek dataset for The Guardian.

Posted in Crowd Sourcing |
6 Comments

Pseudovariety in Soft Drinks

Pseudo-Variety

Three firms own 89% of your sugar water.

(Hmmm, this needs a bit of design IMHO. I might have a chop at it)

Research and visualisation by Dr Phil Howard of Michigan State University. He’s done some other, great visual explorations of key industries including organic food and seeds.

Posted in Data Visualisation, Food |
9 Comments

Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars

Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars | Information Is Beautiful | David McCandless
Articles of War

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
data: http://bit.ly/WikiLame


Research & design: David McCandless
Additional research: James Key
Additional design: Matt Hancock, Joe Swainson

Posted in Culture, Fun, Web |
14 Comments

Hacking India Is Beautiful

Hacking India Is beautiful
This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister’s delegation to India as part of contingent of ‘hackers’ and civic-minded dataheads. We did a hack day with some of India’s leading developers and visualizers.

Check out their great, ingenious work in this post for The Guardian.

Here’s the full bus-heatmap mentioned in the piece.

Posted in Crowd Sourcing, Data Visualisation, Guardian Datablog, Political, heat map |
4 Comments

Cognitive Surplus visualized

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.

He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.


Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

Posted in Comparison Chart, Crowd Sourcing, Quick, Social Networks |
45 Comments

The Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009

The Billion Dollar O Gram 2009 | David McCandless | InformationIsBeautiful.net

The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.

All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar

A little context

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)


Design: David McCandless
Research: David McCandless, Matthew Sawh, Caroline Flyn, James Key
Sources: NYTimes, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and other media reports.
Data: http://bit.ly/bndollar

Posted in Data Journalism, Economics, Infographic, Treemap |
17 Comments

Great Visualizers: Always With Honor

Design duo Tyler Lang and Elsa Chaves are Always With Honor, an Portland-based design team with a specialty in beautifully simple information displays and iconography.

I first got turned on to / by their work when I spotted this awesome poster. It visualizes the many domains within design. Somewhat awesomely.

Always With Honor / Tyler Lang - Great Visualizers / Information Is Beautiful
(Here’s a link to a massive hi-res version)
Read More »

Posted in Great Infographics, Great Visualizers |
3 Comments

Live-Vizzing The Emergency Budget

Live Vizzing The Emergency Budget

“Live-vizzing” a graphic on the UK government’s emergency budget for The Guardian and Open Knowledge Foundation.

Posted in Uncategorized |
5 Comments

Four Great Infographics No. 8

So much great work out there at the moment, I wanted to share it with y’all.

Sekret Firmy Magazine
Russian infography seems to be on the rise. Here are some great visuals from a publication apparently called ‘Sekret Firmy Magazine“. No idea what it’s about. But my eyes just don’t seem to care.

Update: Secret Firmy Magazine is the monthly business magazine of Kommersant, the Russian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Bruce Bennett for the info)

Great Infographics - Secret Firmy Magazine, Bogus Freak
Great Infographics - Secret Firmy Magazine, Timur Shabeav

Images from: Timur Shabaev and BogusFreak.co.uk

Read More »

Posted in Great Infographics, Great Visualizers, Infographic Morsels |
12 Comments

In Deeper Water

In Deeper Water: The DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill
Depressing update of our original DeepWater Horizon image.

The oil spill is now on track to be the 3rd worst in history, depositing the equivalent of 22,000 cars worth of oil into the sea every day.

More info and our data in this online spreadsheet: http://www.bit.ly/InDeepWater


DESIGN: David McCandless
RESEARCH: David McCandless, James Key, Pearl Doughty-White
ADDITIONAL DESIGN: Joe Swainson
SOURCES: International Energy Association, CIA Factbook, International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation Limited, Press Reports
DATA: Explore in this Google doc

Posted in Data Journalism, Environment |
30 Comments