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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Tall Order: 2014 was a big year for big buildings. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (who knew there was such a council?) reported that 97 buildings of 200 meters or taller were completed last year, and the Washington Post turned their data into the cool chart – part bar graph, part illustration – you see above. In short (pun intended), it shows the top 20 as if they were side by side, making for easy height comparison. If anybody needs convincing of China’s construction boom, tell them that half of the 20 tallest skyscrapers raised in 2014 were built in that country.
Pigskin Plot: On Monday night, Ohio State beat University of Oregon 42-20 in the first-ever College Football Playoff National Championship. (A mouthful, but that was the game’s official name.) The win capped off a remarkable season for the Buckeyes, according to the sports data nerds at FiveThirtyEight. Andrew Flowers calculated that Ohio State had the second-highest season ending Elo rating ever (31.7) and found that its rating improved dramatically over the course of the season. Appropriately enough, a plot of team Elo changes (shown above) is shaped like a football.
Project Runway: How efficient is your local airport? The Economist created the chart above showing the world’s 15 busiest airports by passenger volume. The chart is a model of efficiency; along with showing each airport’s passenger volume (the red bar), it shows each one’s size (both as an illustration and in number of square kilometers), along with the number of runways and terminals, present and planned. Comparisons are easy: Denver, huge in size, is dwarfed by Atlanta, which handles almost twice the number of passengers in one-sixth the area.
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 9: Global education, rainfall animation, cutting-edge visualizations
January 2: New Year’s Eve, the news in Tweets, nasty flu season
December 26: Dudes and bros, football on social media, mapping pictures