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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Data of the Dead: A team at ESRI has dug up (not literally, thank goodness) the final resting places of more than 50 of the famous and infamous, and collected them in an interactive Halloween-themed Story Map, “Where Are The Bodies?” combining photos, links, satellite images and text. Included in this Scroll of the Dead are “master of suspense” filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, actor Bela Lugosi (buried in his Dracula cape), and Norwegian “Scream” painter Edvard Munch. Jimmy Hoffa’s listed, too – at his last known whereabouts in Detroit, not the end zone at the Meadowlands.
On the Orange and Black Theme: Lots of excitement here at Actuate headquarters when the San Francisco Giants won the World Series on Wednesday night. (And condolences to our colleagues in Kansas City and their Royals, a great team and a class act.) Game Seven was a serious second-screen contest, with tons of bandwidth used for real-time analysis and punditry. The most data driven live blog of the last game of the season was at FiveThirtyEight, where Nate Silver, Chadwick Matlin, Carl Bialik and Neil Paine put their own spin on play-by-play. (It’s worth reading after the fact.) It included the above chart from FanGraphs that tracked win probability throughout the game. Earlier in the week, Paine had pinpointed the moment at which momentum swung the Giants’ way in the series; we’d love to see him update his graph to include that painful Game Six as well as the triumphant conclusion.
State of the Union: Over at Mental Floss, Rebecca O’Connell has brought together 25 Maps that Describe America. The maps range from the nearly silly (like the map of iconic fast food chains by state, shown below, from Thrillist) to the thought-provoking (a map showing the relative value of $100 by state). O’Connell’s set of maps is compiled from a variety of sources, all of which are linked if you want to drill deeper.
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. Subscribe (at left) and we’ll email you when new entries are posted.