e
Beautiful Data Visualizations from PBS' "America Revealed"
Just as the GoPro camera and YouTube have enabled us regular viewers to see things from a perspective we've never seen before, aerial photography, satellite imagery, number-crunching computers and GPS trackers can help us understand data flows too complicated to easily imagine.
The fantastic PBS miniseries America Revealed, which "explores the hidden patterns and rhythms that make America work," makes stunning use of data-viz techniques to stimulate the eye-candy part of your brain while teaching you something. Pictured up top is what our internet access looks like (image rotated to fit). Below is "the route of a family-run combine harvesting business as they zig zag across the U.S."
These pinpricks of light represent U.S. job losses (rotated to fit).
Most fascinating to me are these blue lines showing the Manhattan travel routes of a pizza delivery guy, taken from the episode looking at how food moves across the country.
This wicked image shows Domino's Pizza's national supply chain.
Here's the trailer for the Food episode, which I'll say is your must-see video of the week:
The full episode is available for free viewing online, at least for U.S. residents, here. (UK readers, you should be able to catch the program through Sky. Everyone else outside the U.S., hit the link and let us know in the comments if the player is allowed in your country.)
-
oFavorite This
-
Q7Comment
Directory Company Profiles
Core77
Industrial Design
Resources
Industrial Design
Resources
-
Core77 Directory
Find the Best Industrial Design CompaniesGo -
Card79CARD 79 gives form to future states by converging strategy, brand, and design. We excel in technical...
-
Zack Group LLC
Zack Group is an award winning brand & package design firm specializing in visual revitalization of ...
-
Studio Redeye, LLC.
Our goal as a full service industrial design studio is to create designs that emotionally connect wi...
-
FLUID Design
FLUID (former LUNAR Europe) is an award-winning creative design and innovation agency located in Mun...
-
The Metcalfe Group, Inc.
Located in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area, we are an experienced full-service product design firm ...
-
Acorn Product Development
Acorn Product Development is based in Silicon Valley with design centers in Boston, Denver, Los Ange...
-
DesignStein Studios, LLC
We are a team of industrial designers focused on developing products that are intended for tooling a...
K
{Welcome
Create a Core77 Account
Already have an account? Sign In
By creating a Core77 account you confirm that you accept the Terms of Use
K
Reset Password
Please enter your email and we will send an email to reset your password.
Comments
http://cartastrophe.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/beautiful-errors/
These are complex visualizations, and Daniel himself made some errors in his first interpretation of the images that he later corrected.
In response to Jack's comment above that "the largest job losses are the progressive/democrat states: California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, etc." I will point out that Jack is misinterpreting the image (following the misleading statement of the original author of this post that the "pinpricks of light represent U.S. job losses"). According to Daniel Huffman's critique that I cited above: "This is actually a map showing the distribution of manufacturing jobs in the 1990s. In the video, the dots wink out -- turn black -- to show the decline of the manufacturing sector. Seen at about 12 min, 50 sec in the video..." So the pinpricks of light represent manufacturing jobs more than a decade ago, not recent job losses. Moreover, since the dots represent the aggregated quantity of jobs per state that have been evenly distributed over the area of each state, a state with larger surface area will seem dimmer (less luminous) than a smaller state with an equal number of jobs. (The distribution of dots does not represent actual geographic distribution, which would be more heavily concentrated in urban areas and not evenly distributed over rural areas and even wilderness areas where human population is very low!) Hence Texas may have had nearly the same number of manufacturing jobs as Ohio in the 1990s, but Ohio appears brighter (more luminous) because its pinpricks of light are evenly distributed over a smaller area.
Finally, to prove a correlation between aggregate number of manufacturing jobs per state and aggregate political party affiliation of each state's voters, as Jack does in his comment above, would require a great deal of investigation and analysis and cannot be assumed in such a facile way.
But still data visualisation on all of the series is brilliant and gives a totally differant view on the country.