The Graphic Account: 1-23-13

Once the go-to small talk topic, you can now have a serious conversation about the weather. This week, we found an interactive map that uses data about climate to lead to incredible discoveries. Other highlights include a visualization that may determine your Oscar picks and the origins of the infographic. Check out the roundup of all things data below. Missed our last installment? Get caught up here.

[App] Expereal, an App that Tracks your Moods

The quantified-self movement has resulted in the creation of literally thousands of apps and tools to record and analyze different aspects of our lives. We can easily track our morning jog, log calories we’ve eaten and level up after doing 100 pushups. But how can we quantify our emotional well-being? Expereal is a mobile app that allows you to rate and analyze your life through data visualizations and analytics. At different times throughout the day, the app can prompt you to record how you’re feeling at that moment in time. Visualizations are then generated providing you with a snapshot of your emotions during the last week, month, or year.

[Visualization] Oscar Winners: A Breakdown by Genre and Release Date

Can a movie’s release date or genre affect its chance of an Oscar nomination or win? The visualizations, featured on The Guardian, aim to find out.

[Visualization] Twitter Oscars Index

No doubt we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg regarding Oscar-related data visualizations, but here is another one by Twitter. The ‘Twitter Oscars Index’ measures how Twitter users are referring to the Academy Awards Nominees relative to overall conversation on any given day. If a nominee has an Index of 50, for example, comments relating to that nominee are more positive than 50% of all other terms on Twitter.

[Timeline] 50 Years of the Rolling Stones

An interactive map highlighting 50 years of Rolling Stones concerts. Scroll through the years to show each tour as it happened including details of the cities visited and number of miles travelled by the band.

[Inspiration] Mail Chimp’s 2012 Report

Annual reports can often be boring affairs, but Mail Chimp has created something to aspire to with their 2012 data; a simple and clean microsite that illustrates the facts and figures with tidy visualizations and humorous iconography, clearly setting itself apart from the crowd.

[Visualization] Poptip: Real-time Twitter Polling

Poptip is a new service that takes online polling to a new level. According to FastCo Design, any user can sign up for the service, ask a question to their followers, and view the results in real-time. While it may be more useful for bigger brands than smaller accounts, it could prove an invaluable tool in consumer interaction. (Image via FastCo Design)

[Visualization] Gun Laws in the U.S., State by State

There has been much discussion recently on the state of gun laws in the U.S., which vary by state. This visualization by The Guardian summarizes these laws in one handy diagram.

[Map] Your Warming World

Using data from NASA, New Scientist has created a world map that shows the average temperature over the past 20 years at any given location. Red represents a temperature increase, while blue means a temperature decrease. Startling results.

[App] Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy is a delightful app that visualizes the weather wherever you are in a wonderfully data-rich format. On a single screen you can view the 24-hr forecast for any given location, with temperature, precipitation and wind all highlighted on the radial dial in a completely intuitive way.

[Article] How a Civil War Vet Invented the American Infographic

A fascinating article over on FastCo Design tells the story of how the superintendent of the U.S. Census paved the way for the modern infographic during the late 1800s by attempting to map the patterns that were hidden in the data. (Image via FastCo Design)



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