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
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.
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.
Analysis of Data visualisation
By Jordan Evans and Jose Fagel
What story does it tell?
It tells us what a working day for American men and women looks like, to see how their schedules differ from each other.
It highlights the relationships between men and women throughout daily activities and explores the journey people take throughout the day.
How does it tell it?
By dots cyan dots representing women and orange dots representing men. Each dot represents a person, and as time moves forward on the clock it shows what the dot is currently doing.
Does it allow for different levels of interrogation that can be seen or used on the part of the reader? eg can they drill down to discover more detail?
The dots are sorted into categories of activities but there are no other levels of information that detail what the person is specifically doing.
Are you able to create multiple stories from it? If so what are they?
It is difficult to track one single dot for the duration of the day however you can create stories as a whole, you can see what a large number of people are doing at a specific time. For example, you can see at 5:00 am the majority of the people are sleeping but at 6:30 am there’s a lot of movement and the group splits into smaller categories by 8:00 am such as traveling, household, and work.
Also, you could read a commentary on men and women’s roles/activities. Like this snapshot at 10:57am. Which shows some disparity in activities (Household care).
The movements the dots take also create patterns and tell of people’s movements throughout the day. Such as dots ping-ponging back and forth from eating and drinking at certain times. Or when large clusters quickly dissolve like at the end of the workday.
What can you say about the visual design- layout, color, typography, visualisation style?
The visual layout and design are effective to be able to see the data flow, the typography is easy to read and laid out good. The user is given several control points to speed up and pause the motion graphic.
What improvements would you suggest?
The color choice for the dots could be more effective and more recognizable. If females were pink or red and men blue or green it could be easier to track the dots.
The option to highlight and track a dot could be useful so you can get to see single stories of peoples working day and routine.
Where does the data came from, and comment on it’s source.
The data was collected over the last few years from the American Time Use Survey which is located on the Bureau of Labour Statistics site.
The source of the data is very reliable as it’s a federal agency that is responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. Its mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision making.
Jordan's Data Visualisation Blog 