The other day, Kieran Healy had a bright idea:
The other day Brett Terpstra posted a gigantic and quite beautifully-executed feature comparison of all of the text editors available for iOS devices. The table is really terrific and also a bit overwhelming, as there's so much data. On the bus home yesterday, it struck me that it might make for a nice data visualization exercise. [...]
He was right. Good work.
This interactive map of Population Density presents a very different perspective on the world.
It's not surprising that as you ratchet up the population density filter Australia disappears from view early on, but it's pretty amazing to see how long Greater London stays on the map, and that it survives longer than any part of the United States. As always, knowing that London is a densely populated city is a very different thing from being able to see how few parts of the world are populated on that scale.
[Via Flowing Data]
This visualization of how Twitter users reacted to Japan's 2011 earthquake acts as a small-scale companion piece to the visualisation of a year's worth of earthquakes I posted the other week.
[Via currybetdotnet]
It's one thing to be intellectually aware of the fact that there are thousands of medium-to-large magnitude earthquakes around the world each year, quite another to see their frequency, magnitude and location plotted in animated form, in great detail. It brings home just how fortunate I am to be living on a small, geologically stable island nation off the coast of the continent of Europe.
[Via Chocolate and Vodka]
A Doctor Who Tube Map. And why not?
[Via currybetdotnet]
See something or say something plots maps of major cities, showing locations from which people tweeted and locations where they posted photographs to Flickr.
Unfortunately I don't know any of the cities well enough to positively identify the locations revealed by the pictures, but a quick look at Google Maps seems to confirm that1 many of the concentrations of red dots in London mark the locations of the various royal or public parks.
I wonder what such a map would look like for Newcastle. I can guess where most of the photos would be taken (i.e. on and around the Quayside), but where would all the tweeters be hanging out?
[Via Flowing Data]
Google's Daniel Ford and Josh Batson have been mapping the languages of the World (Wide Web):
Most web pages link to other pages on the same web site, and the few off-site links they have are almost always to other pages in the same language. It's as if each language has its own web which is loosely linked to the webs of other languages. However, there are a small but significant number of off-site links between languages. These give tantalizing hints of the world beyond the virtual. [...]
[Via MetaFilter]
Andrew Clegg of Last.fm has been doing some data mining, armed only with with a database of lyrics and the contents of of Last.fm's catalogue:
One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data. [...]
The resulting word clouds (plus a bonus 2D chart plotting the degree of similarity between lyric choices in different genres) are fascinating.
Movie budgets, over time. That's one hell of a jump.
It'd be interesting to see how the share of the median budget figure devoted to salaries, production costs, marketing and so on has changed over time. Even more so if we could see how median profitability had changed over the same period; that one's tricky for all sorts of reasons, but without it you can't tell whether the cost inflation has been 'worthwhile.'1
Whether the quality of films has increased that steeply is … difficult to quantify, but not hard to guess.
I don't think this chart of the median Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Score for the ten highest grossing films each year since 1950 tells quite the story it appears to.
On the face of it, there was a step change downwards in the early 1980s, then a further decline set in from the mid-1990s. The message is clear: successful films, on average, are worse nowadays than they have been in fifty years.
The thing is, Rotten Tomatoes only started in 1999, so the reviews it counts of films released significantly earlier than that are necessarily going to be retrospectives, frequently prompted by a DVD release or a director's cut or whatever. Take the reviews of A Hard Day's Night, which was released in 1964. The earliest of them are from January 2000 and appear to have been prompted by the release of a cleaned-up print of the film or a DVD release. Realistically, professional publications aren't likely to pay a reviewer to write a new review of a rerelease of a middling piece of work from forty years ago. If they write about a rerelease at all, it'll be because the film is memorable in some way – an acknowledged 'classic', or perhaps a key film from early in the career of a big name actor or writer or director. This can't help but skew the average rating for older films upwards.
By contrast, when a contemporary film is released the site will be able to sample a full range of reviews, with raves and pans and everything between. This will surely depress the average score quite a bit.
I'm not saying that there aren't terrible films that do well at the box office nowadays: I'm just saying that relying on a skewed sample of reviews doesn't prove it.
The History of Science Fiction in diagrammatic form. Lovely, and surprisingly comprehensive.
About my only criticism of the content of the diagram is that it woefully underemphasises the importance of the magazines as a mass medium up until at least the 1950s. If SF Film gets a whole strand of the diagram to itself, surely the magazine era should be similarly prominent. You can argue that that's a distinction between media rather than genre, but in that case why have a distinct Film & TV branch?1
I don't want to see a completely separate branch of the chart for magazine SF: I just think that it should make clearer the extent to which written SF from the 1930s up until the mid/late 1950s was predominantly short form, with a gradual shift in influence after that point towards longer works.
[Via the inside of my brain]
