Information is Beautiful: Infographic Heaven
Since the inception of the Urban Times, we have been in awe of the power of infographics, and have attempted to bring them to you whenever they come across our path. Yesterday, I saw this talk by brilliant journalist (for the Guardian), data-analyst and designer David McCandless. He is responsible for the site Information is Beautiful, whose moto is “ideas, issues, knowledge, date – visualised!” Well… we couldn’t agree more.
McCandless’ genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data — the actual graphics aren’t the real innovation here — as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). McCandless contributes a monthly big-think graphic to the Guardian’s Data Blog, and makes viral graphics for his blog Information Is Beautiful.
So here is the TED-talk, followed by a selection of the infographics that I was particularly fond of. I humbly post them below and encourage you to check out the website to see what else they’ve come up with.
This is a “treemap of billion dollar amounts”:
This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.
To Visualize the Oil Spill (bare in mind this is up until June 3rd):
The oil spill is now on track to be the 3rd worst in history, depositing the equivalent of 22,000 cars worth of oil into the sea every day.
This one, entitled Cognitive Surplus Visualized was triggered by a talk McCandless heard by writer Clay Shirky talk. It was the:
“idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.” McCandless said, “He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.”
This humourous infographic details “Wikipedia’s LAMEST Edit Wars”
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