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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State the Obvious: It’s not just your kids who can’t put down their phones. Members of Congress were busily tweeting during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. And although the two parties can’t agree on much, they were pretty well synchronized – united, you might say – on when to tweet. In the bar chart above, The New York Times visualized the number of tweets by Democrats and Republicans in five-minute increments throughout the speech. The accompanying article gives details on the process and more analysis of the results.
Law of the Land: You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Rather than take Moore’s Law as an obvious truth, Plotly published a clever blog with an interactive graph (click through the static version above) that proves it. The same blog post also visualizes Zipf’s Law (dealing with word use), Benford’s Law (which explores number frequency) and Hubble’s Law (which is related to the Doppler Effect). Each chart is interactive and has an enticing “Play with this data!” link for further exploration.
Chop chop: Martyn Jones published an article on LinkedIn late last year that outlined 7 New Big Data Roles for 2015 as he saw them. The article generated some buzz in Big Data circles, perhaps in part because of the fanciful titles that Jones suggested. He listed ten roles in all (in spite of the article’s title) including Data Trader, Data Taster, and Data Czar. But my favorite was the Data Butcher, who “removes the fat data from the lean data, and provides quality data that can then be subsequently ‘sliced, diced and spiced’ in downstream analytics applications.” The description was accompanied by the image above. (There’s Fred’s data, right near the tail.)
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 16: Tallest buildings, Ohio State’s Elo rating, airport efficiency
January 9: Global education, rainfall animation, cutting-edge visualizations
January 2: New Year’s Eve, the news in Tweets, nasty flu season