Most Common Words In Toy Adverts

April 10, 2011

Most Common Words in Toy Adverts - Visualized - Information Is Beautiful
Most common words in toy adverts, split by gender. From The Achilles Effect.

Unsurprising results – but still worth tutting over.

See them rendered in Wordle too – boys & girls.

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Great Infographics No.12

April 4, 2011

Great Infographics - InformationIsBeautiful.net

» See our previous great infographics
» Follow our finds as we find them on Google Reader or follow @infobeautiful on Twitter
» Send good stuff you find over here

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6 Comments

Radiation Dosage Chart

March 29, 2011

Radiation Dosage Chart - Information Is Beautiful
Sorry this is so late. I just came back from holiday to an inbox full of requests to render up a Radiation Dosage chart.

Personally, I think XKCD has done a great job already. But I am here to serve.

Hopefully our chart will also help counter some of the confusion circulating about radiation and peril. Here also is a great piece by Anil Dash on understanding radiation exposure.

The data is here: http://bit.ly/RadiationChart

If you like this image, we’re selling a hi-res, instantly downloadable PDF.
It’s $2.50 / £1.50 / €1.70 with all money going to Japan Crisis Relief.
If you’re interested in more charitable artwork, please try DesignersForJapan – some great work there.

Buy in our Store or use this direct PayPal purchase link: http://pul.ly/b/16238
(You’ll be instantly emailed the PDF). Thank you!

Research & design: David McCandless | Data: bit.ly/RadiationChart | Sources: XKCD, Guardian Datablog, BBC News, Mayo Clinic
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36 Comments

What Is Consciousness?

March 22, 2011

What Is Consciousness? Make Up Your Own Mind
Make up your own mind.

Let’s see how many pan-psychic emergent dualists there are lurking in Asia, shall we?

Research, words & design: David McCandless
Illustration: Jez Burrows & Lindsay Noble
Interactive design & code: Joshua Lee
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, Wikipedia,
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125 Comments

Books Everyone Should Read

March 14, 2011

Books Everyone Should Read - Information Is Beautiful
A “consensus-cloud” of most mentioned titles from various book polls & top 100 lists. For The Guardian.

An updated version from my book. Data and analysis here: http://bit.ly/BooksEveryone

If you likee, you can purchase a print-it-yourself high-quality PDF in our store.

DESIGN: David McCandless
RESEARCH: Miriam Quick
ADDITIONAL DESIGN: Matt Hancock
SELECTED SOURCES: UK’s Most Borrowed Library Books, Pulitzer Prize Winners 1948+, AskMetafilter, World Book Day Poll, Man Booker Prize List, Oprah’s Book List.
DATA: http://bit.ly/BooksEveryone
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23 Comments

Vintage InfoPorn No.1

March 7, 2011

My conceit, when I started making infographics, was simple. I believed this was a *new way* of expressing and visualizing information, a thoroughly modern and zeitgeisty fusion of data and design. Oh you muppet David.

1900s

These infographics were created by students of American African-American activist W.E.Dubois in 1902. They’re so modern looking! Right down to the type. So much so, in fact, I had to double-check they weren’t fakes. But no, there’s a huge stack of them in the Library Of Congress. Read a fascinating post on how and why they were created. And a great side-by-side vintage vs modern display here. (Thanks to @JonAkwue for sending)


ISOTYPE

Then there’s ISOTYPE – the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. It was an early infographical form, originated in the 1930s by Austrian philosopher and curator Otto Neurath “as a symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons.” Again, it’s eye-popping how modern these images look. Despite being fashioned from woodcuts and hand-printing methods. Gorgeous.


There’s a gorgeous small-format book on Isotype by Neurath’s wife Marie and Robin Kinross that’s worth a look. (Disclosure: they sent me a review copy)

Gerd Arntz

The vibe of ISOTYPE, and its tight visual language, depended heavily on the pictographic work of German artist Gerd Arntz. He developed over 5000 icons and pictograms, which formed the syllables of the ISOTYPE language. His work has had a strong influence on modern iconography.


Nice!

Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer (look inside) is gorgeous book, recently published by 010 Publishers, celebrating his work (Amazon UK | US). (Disclosure: they sent me a review copy).

Why Now?

So infography has risen and fallen in history. Could it ‘catch’ this time? Feels to me like it could. There’s now a viable medium (the web) and an increasingly visually-literate audience. But, again, is that my conceit? Could infographics and visualized information wipe-out again?

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19 Comments

Learning How To Visualize

February 21, 2011

Exoplanets - Visualization for Wired UK - InformationIsBeautiful.net
Been getting a ton of requests for ‘how to’s and guides for creating decent visualizations and information designs. Made me think: maybe I could do some workshops in this area. I like developing ideas and working with people. Could be fun!

So if you think you’d like to attend a workshop on visualization or organize one for your organisation, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

some guides

In the meantime, you might be interested in a section I’ve been building in a far-flung corner of the site. It documents my process for creating infographics.

The most recent one explores the stages we went through creating an infographic for Wired magazine about planets in other solar systems – or “exoplanets”.

(Microscopic, dark and unimaginably far away, these tiny celestial objects should be impossible to spot. But thanks to extreme telescopy, deep data analysis, and ingenuous hacking, astronomers have now detecting over 500 bizarre and exotic alien worlds thousands of lights years away. So cool!)

Here’s how we created it.

some other examples

Timelines: TimeTravel in TV and Film
Yup, we went through 36 drafts of this. Yes, I am a rampant perfectionist. Yes I can be difficult to work with.




Information is Agonizing: Designing The Cover of the book
Creating the UK cover for Information Is Beautiful was an agonizing yet gloriously creative pain in the ass involving over 90 – yes nine-ty – different versions.


Versioning: Because Every Design Is Good For Something
How do you flag and label 142 countries on a single map without choking the result? With great difficulty.




I hope this is helpful. And again if you think you’d like to attend a workshop to learn how to create these kind of images, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

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7 Comments

Horoscoped

January 19, 2011

Horoscoped - Do horoscopes really just all say the same thing?
Do horoscopes really all just say the same thing? We scraped & analysed 22,000 to see.

See our completed meta-horoscope chart and make up your own mind.

We’ve also created a single meta-prediction out of the most common words..

How we did it

Horoscoped - Scraping 22,000 horoscopes
How do you gather 22,000 horoscopes? Obviously you could manually cut and paste them from one of the many online Zodiac pages. But that, we calculated, would take about a week of solid work (84.44 hours). So we engaged the services of arch-coder Thomas Winnigham to do a bit of hacking.

Yahoo Shine kindly archive their daily predictions in a simple and very hackable format (example). Thank you! So Thomas wrote a Python script to screen-scrape 22,186 horoscopes into a single massive spreadsheet. Screen-scraping is pulling the text off a website after it’s displayed. Python is a programming language. You can use it to write scripts that only gather the specific text you want. Then you run it multiple times so it mines an entire website.

Well, it’s not quite that easy. Big sites like Yahoo have ‘rate-limiting’ on their servers. That means if you access a page too many times too quickly, it thinks you’re a hacker and deploys all kinds of anti-hacking counter-measures. Initially, Thomas set his scraping speed too high (once every 10th of a second) and his IP got instantly banned from Yahoo for 24 hours. After some experimenting (and more bans), he found that a two second delay between scrapes prevented the defense mechanisms from kicking in. The script was set to run in the background (while we smoked cigars and discussed the empire). 12 hours later, we had our 22,000 horoscopes in a single file!

We can’t share the 9.5MB spreadsheet with you because it’s Yahoo’s copyright. But here are the Python scripts should you feel like recreating the experiment.

https://gist.github.com/776219
https://gist.github.com/776228

Filtering it down

Horoscoped - Filtering 22,000 horoscopes
So every different type of horoscope got sucked up – career, teen, love, daily overview. Who knew there were so many? It was felt, though, that career & love predictions would have their internal biases i.e. lots of mentions of work, career, love, marriage etc. So we opted to just analyse the generic daily horoscopes for each sign. A total of 4,380 (365 per star sign).

Word Analysis Version 1

We used an online tool called TagCrowd to find the most common words. I prefer it to Wordle. You’ve got better control over any ‘noise’ in the signal, because you can not only filter common words (“and”, “for”, “is” etc) but also a special ‘stoplist’ of words you’ve chosen.

So we broke down the most common 50 words to see if there are any patterns of unique words. This is what was revealed:

Horoscoped - Unique words in top 50 words in predictions of each star sign

You can see the full data in a Google spreadsheet here.

Word Analysis 2

It struck me that several words in the top 50 – like “someone”, “really”, “quite” – were just qualifiers and not really that revealing. You’d find them in any English word analysis.

So we stripped those kinds of words out (see our stoplist). And lo! A fresh set of unique, revealing and more accurate words appeared in the top words per sign.

Horoscoped - Unique words in top 50 words in predictions of each star sign

Can I just say that I have no personal interest in horoscopes. I don’t know what the various characteristics of each star sign are meant to be. So you’ll have to tell me if any of this corresponds to folklore.

This was the data we used to create our meta-chart. Check out the final image. Or see all the data in this Google spreadsheet.

Meta-Prediction

One more thing though. This analysis appears to reveal something. The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch)

The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all star signs, every day of the year. Here it is.

Horoscoped - Meta-prediction made from most common words in 4,000 star sign predictions

The Future

As ever, I’ve laid out my whole process and all the data here: http://bit.ly/horoscoped.
That way it’s all balanced and you can make up your own mind. Typical Libran!

Concept & research & design: David McCandless
Additional design: Matt Hancock
Additional research: Miriam Quick
Hacking: Thomas Winningham
Source: Yahoo Shine Horoscopes
Code & Scripts: Here and here
Data & workings: bit.ly/horoscoped
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67 Comments

How much carbon…

January 17, 2011

How much Carbon is created by ... Information Is Beautiful

How much CO2 is created by a banana? A wedding? A flight to New York?

We teamed up with GE to turn ‘tons of carbon’ into an interactive visual landscape.

Enter a CO2 value. Hit the ‘random’ button for serendipity. Or just click through objects like stepping stones.

(There are nearly 200 objects so it may take a second to load)

Designed by David McCandless | Code by Daniel Goldsworthy.

cool things I like about this app

Like billions of dollars, “tons of CO2″ is another widely-used metric that is deeply abstracted from our lives. What is a ton of CO2? It’s impossible to imagine. But perhaps it can be better understood relatively and visually?

The data here mixes direct CO2 emissions with CO2-equivalent emissions. CO2e is a calculation that includes the supply chain and production process of a given object. So for a banana, the emissions involved in growing, packaging and getting the fruit to your supermarket.

All the numbers are sourced from reputable news outlets, government studies and from the awesome book How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berner’s-Lee (US | UK)

The app features deep-linking. Each object in the app has its own web-address. So you can link directly to it.

And, like Snake Oil, this is a ‘living app’ which spawns itself from a Google Docs datasheet. That means the moment we edit, add or subtract info, it’s instantly rippled into the app.
See the data here: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbon

So if you find any CO2 amounts in news reports or studies, post a comment below with a link to the source and we’ll try to add it. Or if you want to know the carbon emissions of XXXX, we’ll try to find it out for you.

GE have some other vizzes on their Visualization blog, including some recent work from maestro Ben Fry.

Design: David McCandless
Research: David McCandless, Alexia Wdowski, Mike Berners-Lee.
Illustration: Joe Swainson, Matt Hancock
Flash: Daniel Goldsworthy
Sources: Guardian, JP Morgan, The New York Times and others.
Data: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbon
Posted in interactive, Originals | Tagged , , , |
31 Comments

8 GREAT INFOGRAPHICS No.11

January 10, 2011

Great work out there. I’m a bit behind so I’m giving you a double dose of great infographics.

Moon Flower - Dimitre Lima - InformationIsBeautiful.net

You can follow my shares: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/david.mccandless or follow @infobeautiful

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19 Comments


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