We’re conditioned to visualize data about age and the passage of time along a horizontal axis. The very word timeline illustrates this truth. But the Data Driven Digest this week presents three visualizations related to age that tweak that practice. To which we say: It’s about time.
Mapping Age: Zeit Magazin published a map this week that displays Germans’ average age by geography. Typically this sort of map uses color or hue to distinguish ages, which requires the reader to look back and forth between the map and a legend. To eliminate this distraction, illustrator Jörg Block cleverly uses both numbers and hues; darker regions correspond with older average ages. (Be sure to click through for a larger version.) For the traditionalists, he also provides a legend. A prolific artist, Block has created dozens of great maps illustrating facts about Germany.
Oldest Age: Despite a headline that seems almost absurd, David Goldenberg’s article Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying on FiveThirtyEight provides a fascinating analysis of the ages of very old people. With the exception of a few outliers (clearly visible in the article’s data visualization, shown above), the oldest person in the world keeps getting older; what the chart can’t show is how much the population of very old people is growing. “As the number of these super supercentenarians grows, we should expect even shorter reigns from the oldest of them all,” Goldenberg writes.
Leading Age: Over at Vox, the team of Margarita Noriega, Jonathan Allen and Javier Zarracina have codified and visualized something most of us know intuitively: that aging male actors get more romantic roles than their female counterparts. The Vox team uses the conventional horizontal scale to compare the ages of male and female romantic leads in movies, but they add a twist: They then stack the results according to age difference, rather than the year of release or the box office receipts. A snippet of their main chart is above, but I’d love to see an interactive version that would let me sort the results by box office receipts and year of release. That sort of interactivity helps expose other relationships within the data.
Timelines Explained (bonus item): Not long ago – vague time-frame if there ever was one – Tim Urban wrote a long, thoughtful, sometimes-profane blog post about timelines, titled Putting Time in Perspective. One of Urban’s 22 illustrative timelines is shown above. Chances are you’ve already read Urban’s piece – it’s been shared almost 200,000 times – but if you haven’t, you should.
Like what you see? Every Friday we share great data visualization and embedded analytics. If you have a favorite or trending example, tell us: 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:
May 22: Visualizing public sector budgets in New Zealand, Somerset, MA, and the State of Ohio
May 15: Canadian well-being, California health, Australian flu
May 8: Software developer populations, long workweeks, hospital safety, pop music