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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Tracing Your Steps: Human.co makes a fitness app that encourages people to move 30 minutes or more every day. The app tracks users’ activity, and the collected data – representing 7.5 million miles of motion – has been transformed into visualizations of movement in 30 different cities worldwide. The locales range from the orderly grids of Vancouver, BC to the concentrated chaos of Hong Kong. The image above shows only motorized transport in the Pearl of the Orient; for each city, Human.co also visualizes walking, running and cycling, and compares those figures to data from other cities. The monochrome maps are so beautiful and compelling that the company now sells them as high resolution posters and prints.
Motion Pictures: Graphic designer Jacob O’Neal takes infographics to the next level with Animagraffs, his distinctive, thoroughly researched, animated infographics. We’ve included a static snippet of his most recent effort above, but click through to get the full effect – and to learn about tarantulas, jet engines, flat screens and more. Animagraffs incorporate conventional data visualizations (bar charts, graphs and more) but the magic is in the motion.
Rolling Stock: What’s more efficient – a car, a bike, or a bus? When it comes to space on the street, the photo above – in essence, a real-world infographic – shows that buses are king of the road. The photo (created by Cycling Promotion Fund, an Australian bicycle organization) shows 69 people on each conveyance – one bus, 69 bikes (sorry, no tandems) or 60 cars (1.1 people per car, on average, in Australia; CPF rounded the number of cars down). The image mimics a picture made a few years ago in Münster, Germany (click here to see it and read a critique), but Peter Bourke of CPF shared with us a similar image found in a 1929 advertisement from the Kansas City Railways Co. Bonus: the video below shows how CPF made its picture.
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 28: NFL records, mustache logos, popular Instagram pics
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