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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Punt, Pass and Click. Week 13 of the NFL season is shaping up to be a great one. Bleacher Report states that only one game (Washington at Indianapolis) has a spread greater than seven points, and three games have one-point spreads in the early Vegas books. If you’re looking for a longer perspective, head over to FiveThirtyEight and check out its Interactive History of the NFL. Benjamin Morris explores the wildly different routes the Patriots and Cardinals have taken to their 9-2 records, and drops in some endlessly entertaining charts (screenshot above) that let you track and compare each franchise’s cumulative margin of victory since its founding.
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Win By A Whisker. We’re leaving Movember, but facial hair is still on our minds (if not our chins). Emblemetric, which analyzes U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data to report on logo trends, recently reported on a growing pattern: The percentage of new U.S. corporate logos that feature facial hair has risen rapidly since the turn of the millennium. The chart above shows the trend, and the complete article, The Growth of the Mustachioed Logo, gives examples and puts the data in context. Now that they mention it, we do see a lot of mustaches around – most prominently on Lyft cars and mixologists – but we’re not adding handlebars to the Actuate logo just yet.
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Favorite Exposure. Many of us will take and share photos over the coming weeks. But what makes a shared photo popular? Dan Zarrella of HubSpot gathered and analyzed data from 1.5 million randomly selected Instagram photos in an attempt to identify characteristics that correlated to higher than average likes-per-follower. Among his findings, shown in the graph above: People Like (capital L) and Comment on brighter photos more often. Check out Zarrella’s complete “The Science of Instagram” infographic and turn on your flash.
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.
Past Data Driven Digests:
November 21: GitHub repositories, best dogs, pumpkin-spice craze
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
