Browse Statistics
The Australian Bureau of Statistics purpose is to inform Australia’s important decisions by partnering and innovating to deliver relevant, trusted, objective data, statistics and insights.
Tag: Data Visualisation
DataArt
With BBC Backstage
This project is about BBC data and how it can be visualised in a creative and informative way. In blurring the boundary between art and information DataArt aims to reach both experts and non-experts alike to grow interest in a media area of increasing public importance.
Eager Eyes
Visualisation and Visual Communication
See the latest in what’s happening in information visualisation. Digest new and emerging developments and explore everything about visualisation.
FlowingData
A Day in the Life: Women and Men
A simulation of a working day for men and women to see how schedules differ. Below shows the results. Each dot represents a person, where cyan represents women and orange represents men.
This is a simulation, based on data from the American Time Use Survey.
Lecture Pod Eight
Nathalie Miebach: Art Made of Storms
TED Talk by Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time. The sculptures then become a musical score for a string quartet to play.
The musical score played was made up of interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded from Hurricane Noel in 2007.
Every single bead and every single coloured band represents a weather element that can be read as a musical note.
From the beginning, Nathalie extracts information from a specific environment using low tech data collecting devices and compares her findings with information on the internet. So she now has historical and real data, which she then compiles on separate clipboards and then she begins her translation process.
What Nathalie loves about her work is that it challenges assumptions of visual vocabulary and where it belongs in the world of art versus science.
The sculpture, depending on where it’s placed could be a sculpture, a three-dimensional visualisation of data or a musical score, and that’s what she likes is that it challenges the viewer as to what visual language is a part of science versus art versus music.
Reflection
The final TED talk by Natalie Miebach was an interesting use of data sets and how she turned these data sets into beautiful pieces of art. I learnt that as a designer there is a lot of uses for data and turning data into art sculptures is very inspiring and exciting.
Lecture Pod Seven
David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualisation
The TED talk by David McCandless is about turning complex data sets into beautiful simple diagrams.
Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut and possibly change the way we see the world.
McCandless believes that if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge.
To see the bigger picture, what’s needed is relative figures that are connected to other data, this can lead to changed perspectives
McCandless’ process begins with applying information visualisation to ideas and concepts. He believes that solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design are about solving information problems.
Visualising information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful.
Reflection
The TED talk by Michael McCandless was an insightful lecture about the art and beauty of data visualisation. He talks about the complexity of data and how to turn these sets into beautiful simple diagrams.
Lecture Pod Six
The Guardian
What is Data Journalism?
Data journalism is the use of key information sets, key data and/or key reference elements to inform a story.
Data lets you tell a story in a way that people watching and receiving it will understand it an enjoy it.
As long as the workings and evidence behind the story data journalists can be open and transparent about that, it makes the story so much stronger.
Data journalism is the recognition of the power of measurement in helping public conversations. It is a modern way of doing journalism.
The Guardian are regraded as the pioneers of data journalism, they’ve had a strong history in data visualisation.
There are a number of people across the organisation who work with data everyday, from the research department to journalists to interactive designers and people who visualise data for a living.
Data is very important these days because there are huge amounts of data and we have access to tools and the ability to analyse it, find patterns, structure it and reveal trends.
Part 2: History of Data Journalism at The Guardian
Data Journalism is brand new, it relies on the technology of the moment and didn’t exist before 2009.
Journalists at The Guardian have been using data since the first issue of 1821.
The Manchester Guardian, 1821, has a front-page that consists entirely of averts, whilst the recent news content can be found on the inside of the paper.
An example of early data journalism in this edition is a table of data that lists every school in Manchester, with how many children in each school and the cost of girls and boys, this was 60 years before compulsory education.
Battle of Somme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIa5EoxyvZI
By 1947, the paper quality is better and the content is much more visual.
The Guardian Data blog in 2013 is digital, an example from this new age era is when the meteorites hit Russia, data was taken from the meteorological site and used to map out and plot meteorite locations over the world. This gives journalists and news companies the power of speed to create a data visualisation, something that people would envy many decades ago.
Part 3: Data journalism in action: the London Olympics
The alternative medals table
The Guardian worked with the Imperial College London to create a live tale that sorts through nations at the 2012 Olympics.
You don’t want a designer to keep having to re-draw a new data visualisation each day.
The interactive designer had this visualisation running off a google spreadsheet,
The numbers were updated everyday and those changed those graphics live as it happened.
The most important thing about data that is supplied is it has to be precise and accurate, there has to be a logical way for the coding to talk back to the visual.
By exploring through the data ad visuals yourself, you can make your own assumptions and stories and engage within that community aspect of data journalism.
Reflection
In this lecture pod, I learnt what data journalism is and why it is useful. I also found the history of The Guardian interesting and the use of history and data journalism used for the London Olympics and the Battle of the Somme useful and engaging.
Creating a Dashboard in Tableau
Today we learned how to make dashboards to use when we begin putting together stories from multiple data visualisations.
The following dashboards I created are not final, they have been created for practice so when I create future dashboards I’ll have more experience of what to create.
The data visualisations I created are about time spent doing activities by gender and time spent on screens.
Without context, it is already clear that university students spend a good amount of time on devices. You can see the average amount of hours spent on each device, as a university student a specific device should translate to whether or not enough university study is being done.
The other chart I created compares the time spent on activities by gender, this is useful because you can compare data and create stories based on each activity.
This activity was helpful to me so I can see which visualisations I can include in my final infographic. I will also need to add additional information to contextualise my graphs.
Gathering Unit-Wide Statistics
During today’s class, we received a set of data recorded from each student studying this unit. The data reflected what each student did for activities during the week.
The task was to create a quick data visualisation of the recorded week.
I decided to make a data visualisation on the use of transport from all students in the unit.
From this visualisation, we can see which mode of transport is most popular and most used in that week recorded.
We can also observe and make stories, such as how students get to university and back.
I believe this is a good start to an effective visualisation, with more refinement and more direction I believe I can take this data and use it for my final infographic.
Deaths from Particulate Matter
In class today, we were asked to make three visualisations from a set of data, which were death rates from ambient particulate air pollution; it showed trends in emissions from 1990 to 2017. One of them had to be a choropleth, a map that uses differences in shading, colouring, or the placing of symbols to indicate the average values of a particular quantity in those areas. The data presented a global-level overview of air pollution.
Jordan's Data Visualisation Blog 