Each Friday we share some favorite reporting on, and examples of, data driven visualizations and embedded analytics that came onto our radar in the past week.
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Language Lessons. Donnie Berkholz of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk studied GitHub repositories by language over the past five years and created the clean and informative graph above. Showing it around the Actuate headquarters, our team had several reactions: Several of our engineers questioned wither GitHub repositories were representative of the real-world percentage of all programming languages in use. (The RedMonk team and Berkholz’s readers raised the same question, and many others.) Other colleagues noted the growth of Java and JavaScript, saying that the languages’ flexibility contributed to their wide use. Colleagues also noted that Actuate made a good choice in using those languages for BIRT and BIRT iHub. What’s your reaction to the graph?
Dog Days: David McCandless of Information is Beautiful shared the above chart of dog breeds this week. (Click through to the original, full-size version, and be sure to fetch the underlying data too.) The chart summarizes and visualizes data from several sources, and employs many great data visualization practices simultaneously: Overall it’s a scatter plot, with the Y axis being the dog’s popularity (from American Kennel Club data) and the X axis showing McCandless’s proprietary (but open) dog data score that incorporates intelligence, longevity, health, grooming costs, and more. The size and color of the silhouettes provide more layers of information, as do the dogs’ noses: clever dogs face right, while dumb ones look left. Can you find your best friend in the pack? (Mine just squeaks into the “Hot dog!” quadrant.) Do you have a bone to pick with the chart?
Squash This Holiday Trend: The Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science (which cops to being “a part-serious, part-satirical journal publishing science-related articles”) posted a piece with graphs (but no pie charts, thank goodness) that took on something we all know anecdotally: The juggernaut of pumpkin spice-flavored foodstuffs is growing out of control. Using Google Trends data, the authors, J. Olan Tern and L. van Pelt (there’s a clue), came up with the terrifying near-hockey-stick above, and concluded their report with these ominous words: “Looking to 2015 and beyond, we see no reason for optimism that the pumpkin spice craze is nearing completion.” The full report is here.
Do you have a favorite or trending resource on embedded analytics and data visualization? Share it with the readers of the Actuate blog. Submit ideas to blogactuate@actuate.com or add a comment below. Subscribe (at left) and we’ll email you when new entries are posted.
Recent Data Driven Digests:
November 14: Where veterans live, rap lyrics, physical data visualizations
November 7: Flu trends, political maps, Twitter use in New York City
October 31: Where are the bodies?, World Series, 25 maps that describe America
October 24: NFL quarterbacks, what the world eats, job categories by city