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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Circle of Learning: Acasus, a Dubai-based consultancy that helps governments to reform education and health policy, worked with Vignette Interactive to create one of the most thought-provoking maps I’ve ever seen. Shown above, it displays the number and percentage of children in the world who reach a basic level of education. The color code shows the percentage (red to green equals low to high) and the circle size shows the number of children. In spite of presenting the data in this manner, the finished product still is clearly recognizable as a map of the earth. It’s beautifully done, and the full interactive version is endlessly interesting.
Wet Ones: Along similar lines, Views of the World is a website created Benjamin Hennig, an academic geographer. He collects maps that visualize earth data – from forestry to tsunamis to demographics – in myriad creative forms. One of Hennig’s own creations, shown above and linked here, is an animated map that depicts where precipitation falls over the course of a year. The map resembles a pumping heart as much as anything (Africa and South America, in particular), and it’s fascinating to watch the rains ebb and flow in regions you know well.
Gallery Show: Take a trip through some extraordinary data visualizations in Beyond The Visualization Zoo, a blog post by Mike Beneth that appeared on Data Science Central this week. Beneth writes about his favorite book on data visualization, then illustrates his book report with some usual entries, such as the hive plot above (click through for the interactive version). His examples are all drawn from the D3 gallery. Beneth’s article reminds us how far data visualization has come – and highlights the challenging frontiers that still lay ahead as we try to visualize new sources like genetic data.
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:
January 2: New Year’s Eve, the news in Tweets, nasty flu season
December 26: Dudes and bros, football on social media, mapping pictures
December 19: Song titles, gender neutral names, Ruble troubles
– See more at: http://blogs.actuate.com/data-driven-digest-for-january-2-2015/#sthash.jqUCP1AQ.dpuf