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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Om Data: Word clouds can be great,* but they’re not always enough; sometimes you also need to show relationships between words. That’s what the folks at Information is Beautiful did with the graphic above (part of a larger infographic; click through to see it). It charts the benefits of meditation and mindfulness based on more than 75 clinical studies; organizes them into four broad groups: cognitive, physical, emotional and social benefits; charts the strength of evidence supporting the claim by word size (as in a word cloud); and organizes it all to show where benefits overlap. (For example, “increased self-control & will power” is considered both a cognitive benefit and an emotional one.) The result is an enlightening visualization.
* You can now create word clouds in OpenText Analytics using the new custom visualizations capability in BIRT iHub 3.1. Learn about the new version here.
Wave Length: Politicians in Washington are once again arguing about immigration policy. If they want to inform their debate with data, they could start with the chart above. (Click through for the full interactive version.) Natalia Bronshtein has visualized nearly 200 years of U.S. immigration data from the federal Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Hover your mouse anywhere on the graphic to see statistics on the many lands immigrants hail from, organized by country and decade. Bronshtein’s homepage has many more compelling interactive visualizations.
Where Are You: Data Science Central, a social network for big data, business analytics and data science practitioners, has an ongoing project to understand where its members live and work. The organization correlated its own membership list with data from job websites in the U.S. to come up with the map above; Livan Alonso took the data a step further to produce the map below. Vincent Granville, Data Science Central’s founder, has asked Alonso to slice and dice the data further, so this is definitely a work in progress as well as a labor of love.
Got a favorite or trending resource on embedded analytics and data visualization? Share it with the readers of the OpenText Analytics 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:
February 20: Lunar new year travels, mapping sounds, winning poker hands
February 13: Shopping malls, subway germs, advice for choosing visualizations
February 6: Anthony Davis, California farmland, Where’s Waldo?