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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Deep Dish Data: The Data Driven Digest avoids politics, but we proudly cast our vote in favor of pizza. While we believe that pepperoni has bipartisan support, BloombergBusiness this week looked into the intersection of pizza and politics – and used a clever graphic to show how Big Pizza slices up its lobbying dollars. We’re only showing two charts out of six here; the other four (click through to see them) roll out how the other pizza makers spend their political dough. The size of each pie represents the relative amount of contributions. We assume that tips and delivery fees are extra.
Screen Test: Sometimes a chart simply confirms something we already know. For example, you know intuitively that young people use their smartphones for more hours of the day than their elders. The chart above, published by the Economist and built on data from Ofcom, brings that fact to stark light. Focus first on the spider chart on the left. What’s most striking to me is how consistently all groups are on their phones during waking hours (roughly 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.), though the oldest group takes a break at dinnertime and the youngest group gets on their devices even more at lunchtime. The right spider chart shows that TVs lead the screen wars in the evening, but age groups aren’t split out.
Washington Monument: While we’re discussing screen time and the influence of television, we note the chart above. It shows the ranking of the game app Monument Valley on several mobile platforms – a ranking that takes a big jump on the morning of February 28. Why is that significant? Because the ranking jumps about five hours after Netflix dropped season three of House of Cards – and in episode five of the show, scheming President Frank Underwood relaxes by playing Monument Valley. We always warn that correlation is not causation, but this might be the exception that proves the rule. The creator of the chart, appFigures, digs into the data on its blog.
Data Visualization Contest! (bonus item): Love to play with data, and want some extra pounds? (Pounds Sterling, that is – not pounds that show up on the bathroom scale.) The Bank of England has launched its first-ever data visualization contest and has offered a £5,000 first prize. To get you started, the bank has released several data sets to work with. “We want to see what others can do with these data sets, to show something novel or insightful. The visualization could for example be a static description of an interesting pattern or relationship in the data or the creation of an interactive app. You are free to focus on whatever you would like, as long as some of the newly available data is used!” The deadline is May 1, 2015, and contest details are on the Bank of England website.
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 27: Meditation, immigration to the U.S., geography of data science
February 20: Lunar new year travels, mapping sounds, winning poker hands
February 13: Shopping malls, subway germs, advice for choosing visualizations