Category Archives: visualization

An Average Day

The New York Times chose to lead this story by pointing out that “the unemployed have more time for leisure and socializing“.   Yes, that seems pretty likely.

But in any case the interactive graph they created from their data is a pretty interesting breakdown of how different groups spend their days, by time of day. 

graphday

It’s full of “obvious” information, like men seem to watch more TV and do less housework, but it’s intriguing to play around with the different groups, they’ve certainly tried to analyze the data.  Here are some facts that I’m sure you wanted to know:

  • Women shop for an average of half an hour a day
  • At midnight, 2% of all Americans (which equates to 6m people) are working
  • At noon, 4% of all Americans (12m) are asleep…
  • 25% of people spend more than an hour travelling to work
  • At 8:50pm, 2 fifths of people are in front of the television

More evidence that we’re a pretty predictable bunch of beings…

Exploring the news, visually

I’ve said on here before that not enough visualisation is being used, so it’s great to find new ideas – even if they’re not totally useable/useful. DoodleBuzz is one such example, you could call it the Zen of news exploration. Even after 5 minutes of doodling, I have relatively little idea of what’s going on. But I do feel a lot calmer.