Visualizing Presidential election

Even before polling places closing reporters and pundits have been projecting the winner through out the night.  It is 11:10 PM Pacific time, and we already know how the American people voted.

Although there is one winner in any election, there are many ways to look at how people voted.  By state, by religious belief, married or single, education background and by income level, to name a few.  This incredibly rich way of dissecting data is what makes Big Data analysts excited.  As analysts gain more insights about the data set and as they explore the relationships among different factors, there continues to be new reports that the analysts can create.

NYTimes has done another excellent work in presenting the Presidential election result.

Source: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president

A good report tells a story.  A good visual report tells a story without using words and numbers.

Data visualization: How 100meter dash records have improved

There are more data than we can possibly consume.  All of us get too many emails, social network updates and news to handle.  When you have too much data and it starts obscuring the forest, you need to back up and relate other data points with latest data points.

There is one excellent example of visualizing 100 meter dash winners finish time.  Kevin Quealy and Graham Roberts created this animation to illustrate how 100 meter dash finish time has improved over the years.



Instead of showing you actual time of each Olympics winners (data points), it shows how much Olympics winners' performance has improved over time.  The animation is about visualizing the data and showing everything in context.

That's what data analyst does.  Data analyst's job is to ask a question about relationships among data points and create new insights from them.  Often these relationships are not at all obvious when you are combing through individual data points.  It is especially hard to qualitatively understand and communicate what a relationship is even when you have quantitative data.

Computer industry will need many more data analysts.  Starting with user's online shopping data to website visiting patterns are all recorded and digitized these days.  Someone has to be able to string all those data points together and be able to tell a consistent story around seemingly random data points.

Data Visualization: Show Me Forest, Not The Trees

Too much light often blinds gentlemen of this sort. They cannot see the forest for the trees.
- Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet and writer (1733-1813)

Internet made all of us to be inundated with more information than we can all possibly consume. There are traditional news media reporting news, blogs and other opinion pieces produced by individual users. And as more people spend their time with Facebook and Twitter, more social media contents are being created by our friends and families. We are all being overloaded with more information than we can handle.