The Facebook Data Team has published an analysis of the status updates of Facebook users, by categorizing words according to the 68 categories of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Dictionary, and tabulating the frequencies of their use. It's fairly interesting to see this kind of analysis applied to Facebook, but ... [Read more...]

RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the ... [Read more...]

Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, was interested in visualizing the "locality of friendship". Luckily, he has some great data to work with: Facebook's social network of the friendships between its 500 million members. But visualizing that much data can be a challenge in its own ... [Read more...]

If you're creating a bar chart in R, how do you decide what colors the bars should be? Or if you're creating an image plot, what range of images should you use? The colors you choose can not only affect the viewer's interpretation of the graphic, it can also determine ... [Read more...]

cumsum ( rnorm(50), lend="butt", lwd=12, type="h" ) Cumulative sum of 50 draws from a normal distribution. File this under mysteries of the Central Limit Theorem. [Read more...]

Amanda Cox of the New York Times' graphics department recently gave a great presentation to the New Media Days conference in Copenhagen and described how the Times uses data visualizations to reveal patterns, provide context, describe relationships, and even create a sense of wonder about the world. In the video, ... [Read more...]

Probably everyone has seen Hans Rosling’s famous TED talk by now. I recently came across a couple of other exceptional talks on data visualization: Hans Rosling again: Let my dataset change your mindset. If only all statistics lecturers were this dynamic! David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization. Not ... [Read more...]

This is a clip from the forthcoming BBC4 program, The Joy of Stats: The clip shows Hans Rosling (who we've profiled here before), plotting life expectancy versus income for various countries, and animating over time. The clip amply demonstrates that with the right presentation and story, even the simplest of ... [Read more...]

Nathan Yau has just published at FlowingData a step-by-step guide on making bubble charts in R. It's actually pretty simple: read in data, sqrt-transform the "bubble" variable (to scale the bubbles by area, not radius), and use the symbols function to plot. It's the last step, though, that really ups ... [Read more...]

Today is Veterans Day in the US, and Remembrance Day or Armistice Day elsewhere in the world. Whatever you know this day as, it's a day for remembering the sacrifices of those who served. Drew Conway has commemorated the day in a touching yet saddening way, by visualizing with R ... [Read more...]

You might recall we posted a couple of weeks ago this chart summarizing the times of the day Firefox users switch on Private Browsing mode: The chart, based on data from the Mozilla Test Pilot program tells an interesting story about the habits of Web users. But what other interesting ... [Read more...]

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Yesterday's US election is pretty much over now: most of the results are in, the pundits have offered their political analysis, and there's even been a bit of mathematical analysis of the results, too. But last night as the results were flowing in, R user Brock Tibert just wanted to ... [Read more...]

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Edward Tufte created this "Lights-On Map", animating the grants under the American Recovery and Investment Act (more commonly known as the Stimulus): Click the image to see the lights come on over time. It's a nice visualization of the distribution of the stimulus projects over the country and time, but ... [Read more...]

This is Part 4 of a five-part article series, with new parts published each Thursday. You can download the complete article from the Revolution Analytics website. High Quality Graphics, Made Easy R is especially useful for generating charts and graphics, quickly and easily. The ability to create visual plots of complex ... [Read more...]

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The winners of this year's ggplot2 case study competition have been announced. I was honoured to be asked to be a judge of the competition this year, but it was a difficult job with so many excellent entries. In the end, the judging panel (which included Heike Hoffman and Hadley ... [Read more...]

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