The other day, Amy pointed me towards a site called Information is Beautiful, which she said “you’ll like.” She was right. It’s the home page of one David McCandless, who has made it his business to organize information into, um, beautiful charts and graphs.
I like. Sometimes his site also showcases the work of others, like the drugs Venn diagram, above, which is a tweaked version of someone else’s work. Click on it for full-size. I also liked the “calories vs. caffeine” chart, partially excerpted below, which allows everyone to make a fully informed choice as to the pros and cons of cola and/or tea.
It immediately reminded me of a site I always mean to explore further, called Swivel, which advertises itself as “tasty data.” The cool thing about Swivel is that anyone can upload data — and a lot of people have scraped data from government sources, so it’s well-sourced. But the really cool thing about Swivel is that you can take anyone’s data set and combine it with any other data set. So you get weird cross-references like the U.S. gross domestic product charted alongside the average yearly temperature. Or, take a look at rates of violent crime compared with how much wine people drink.
There’s loads of fun stuff in both sites. If you come across great things, leave a link in the comments!
Grant Hamilton
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