Tag: data visualization

Who Old Are You?

This data visualization from informationisbeautiful.net takes in your date of birth and compares you to many, many other people and events in life using a dotplot. Each of the colors represents a type of event, usually corresponding to a certain person, while the black dot represents where you are on the visualization. For example, my age is 18, and right behind my dot is Frida Kahlo’s beginning of painting. The dots are placed along a vertical and horizontal axis, where the vertical represents the amount of people at that approximate age while the horizontal represents that age at which a certain event or associate person is placed. What I can see here is that I am right at the cusp of where many famous individuals had their start. What I find most interesting about this data visualization is that I can really see that most people had their start at an older age at me, which is somewhat reassuring as my peers and friends, along with myself, feel that they need to “catch up” with others at various competitive values, such as academics, career, sport, etc. I also like that despite the large amount of dots, it’s still very readable and shows a clear pattern.

Hot Days

This data visualization from flowingdata.com takes your hometown and birth year to output a series of line graphs that show the number of days on average per year where the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit. There are two axis: the vertical represents the numbers of days on average per year that were hot, and the horizontal represents each year that has passed (and to be passed). For example, I used my birth year (2000) and my birth town (Duluth, GA) and found that it was relatively hot that year, which made sense seeing as it’s Georgia. Then, the data visualization showed me that today, it would be an average of 42 hot days a year, which is an 8 day increase from the previous graph. The final graph shows a prediction for the next 60 years, which shows a significant increase in hot days per year and includes an approximate range since the statistics are predictions that cannot be pinpoint accurate. This data visualizations purpose is to show the trend of increasingly warmer and warmer summers due to climate change. I find it interesting that they used data like birth year and hometown because it’s more personal, so it’ll have more of an impact to those who are viewing the graphs.