Mountains Out Of Molehills

August 4, 2009

Mountains Out Of Molehills

Watch out! A timeline of global media scare stories.


source: Google News | see in hi-res | download an A4 PDF
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Posted in Comparison Chart, Data Journalism, Health, Media, Timelines.
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21 Comments

  1. Andy G
    Posted August 5, 2009 at 8:38 pm | Permalink

    Why isn’t Global Warming on this chart? That would be a hilarious piece of data that would clearly need to be at the back of the graph due to the absurd amount of media coverage. People love that s…

  2. emma
    Posted August 6, 2009 at 8:45 am | Permalink

    Beautiful work here! We’re doing a bit of information visualisation for a final MA project in Interactive Media, but using museum artifacts and data – sort of like an interactive way of changing the view of the data. Finding it really hard to represent qualitative data, as opposed to statistics – do you have any thoughts/ ideas or advice?

  3. Cor Blimey
    Posted August 6, 2009 at 11:52 am | Permalink

    love the site. but you spelt “Millennium Bug” with only one N :(

  4. david
    Posted August 6, 2009 at 12:19 pm | Permalink

    Sounds cool. Can you mail me at informationisbeautiful [at] gmail with maybe a few details on the data etc. Thanks! D

  5. neil
    Posted August 16, 2009 at 8:28 pm | Permalink

    think you left off terrorism

  6. auntie em
    Posted August 17, 2009 at 10:52 am | Permalink

    That is a very arresting visualisation. How did you determine the “intensity” of stories though?

  7. auntie em
    Posted August 17, 2009 at 10:57 am | Permalink

    My bad – my old lady eyes couldn’t read the lower case grey text on the Y axis. Damn I need new glasses…

  8. Dan F
    Posted August 17, 2009 at 11:30 am | Permalink

    That’s truly beautiful dude

  9. Shane
    Posted August 17, 2009 at 2:29 pm | Permalink

    What about terrorism?

    “In the 29 OECD countries for which comparable data were available, the annual average death rate from road injury was approximately 390 times that from international terrorism.”
    http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/6/332

  10. Katherine
    Posted August 18, 2009 at 1:31 am | Permalink

    Pity it doesn’t go back further.

  11. Twit Fan
    Posted August 18, 2009 at 7:24 pm | Permalink

    I have to admit, this is hilarious! Innovation at its’ best.
    Go and apply for an economics position within the W.H. immediately!
    Surely you can outdo them all!

  12. jon
    Posted August 19, 2009 at 3:22 am | Permalink

    Just stumbled across the site, absolutely fantastic.

    About this graphic, have you tried graphing so called ‘real’ news stories on it as well, for a sense of comparison? I’d be interesting to see peaks and dips in war related stories, and whether swine flu drowns them out or not.

  13. neil
    Posted August 26, 2009 at 9:43 pm | Permalink

    Shane – Exactly

  14. Laura
    Posted October 12, 2009 at 2:38 pm | Permalink

    Great graph – a few more typos; you’ve called it “Austism vaccinations”. It’s an MMR vaccination, and the apparently-unrelated-condition is autism.

  15. Womyn2me
    Posted October 21, 2009 at 8:01 pm | Permalink

    lovely graph… need to add the upcoming 2012 Mayan Calender fun…

  16. Alex den Haan
    Posted October 23, 2009 at 9:53 am | Permalink

    “Funny” how the killer wasps have the appearance of shark fins, that surface each summer and that they are responsible for the highest number of fatalities.

  17. BTMR
    Posted October 23, 2009 at 7:44 pm | Permalink

    At the British Traditional Molecatchers Register we deal with Molehills and the cause of them day in and day out and it is never surprising how small the cause of a big disturbance is…….. maybe if you have a real problem with real molehills we can help …..www.britishmolecatchers.co.uk

  18. PTBAT
    Posted November 2, 2009 at 5:15 pm | Permalink

    Visual love: immense
    Content-wise: strange, I would have thought that the ‘Iraq and weapons of mass destruction’ hysteria would actually top this chart…?

  19. Anonymous
    Posted November 12, 2009 at 5:06 am | Permalink

    Great graph.That’s really funny !I want to buy a copy of your book, definitely !This is amazing visualisation.Thanks for sharing it here…

  20. Daniel
    Posted December 26, 2009 at 11:12 am | Permalink

    Where is 2012 and global warming? Oh wait… You guys probably are one of those really smart about every thing else but this shits legit types… meh.

  21. dianne lien
    Posted January 26, 2010 at 2:56 am | Permalink

    There is something about visualizations that surpasses all words. The cliche “a picture speaks a thousand words” fits. There is a visuwords, that defines words with visualizations. Fascinating!

5 Trackbacks

  1. By Visualización de alarmas mediáticas | astillero on August 9, 2009 at 8:55 am

    [...] Visualización de alarmas mediáticas según el número de historias recogidas en Google News. Para comparar, en la leyenda inferior se recogen las amenazas junto con el número de muertes a nivel mundial que han provocado. En la mayor parte es cero, y la amenaza más letal parecen ser las “abejas asesinas”, que se han llevado por delante a 1000 personas, cuatro veces más que la gripe aviar. [...]

  2. By Pixel-Love » Blog Archive » Cycle of Violent Chatter on August 10, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    [...] (Post made with a nod to Pete Fairhurst, image also clipped from Information is Beautiful). [...]

  3. By Mountains Out Of Molehills | Information Is Beautiful — Simple Complexity on August 12, 2009 at 3:29 am

    [...] Source: Information Is Beautiful [...]

  4. By August round-up of media stories « We Study Media on August 24, 2009 at 8:54 am

    [...] Mountains Out Of Molehills | Information Is Beautiful [...]

  5. By A Timeline of Global Media Scare Stories « Free Market Mojo on September 3, 2009 at 8:02 am

    [...] HT: Information is Beautiful [...]

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