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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Bros and Cons: Dudes everywhere raised a White Russian this week to celebrate the Library of Congress enshrining “The Big Lebowski” in its National Film Registry. Is it coincidence that Quartz published an interactive map this week showing the popularity of the word “dude” on Twitter? Working with data from forensic linguist Jack Grieve and “several billion” tweets collected by Dianshen Guo of USC, Quartz’s interactive map also tracks “bro,” “buddy,” “fella” and “pal.”
Winning Online: When we talk sports around the office, my colleague Brian often offers this insightful observation: “The team with the most points at the end of the game wins 100% of the time.” But teams today compete off the field, too; football clubs (Americans call them “soccer teams”) are in cutthroat competition for social media followers. Jamie Jackson at The Guardian has gathered and analyzed stats on the teams that win at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube here. No surprise, but clubs that are victorious on the pitch aren’t necessarily the winners in cyberspace.
Map Your Pics: If you like to take pictures with your phone when you travel, you can use the geotagging feature of your photos to create a map showing the places you’ve been. That’s what Marco Altini did to generate the map above. He lays out his inspiration and method in a blog post and shares his R script code on GitHub. One benefit of Altini’s method: it works even if you don’t consistently have location tracking turned on.
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:
December 19: Song titles, gender neutral names, Ruble troubles
December 12: California drought, shopping season, visualizing sounds of Manhattan
December 5: Human movement, animated infographics, transit efficiency