And the winner of the Information is Beautiful Award is....A Day in the Life of a New York City Taxi, displaying the data of a single NYC taxi driver over a single day in 2013. You can see where the taxi went, how much money it made and how busy it was or wasn't over a 24 hour period in a single day.
Another Information is Beautiful Award went to this experiment. Not clear what the assumptions are here, but the data scientist here said that Shakespeare used 28,829 words in his corpus, suggesting that his vocabulary was around 100,000 words. Do hip hop artists have a similarly large knowledge of the English language? Examining the first 35,000 words of 85 hip hop artists, based on examining 3 to 5 studio albums and EPS of each artist, the results are riveting! Revered hip hop artists such as 2Pac and Snoop Dogg were only in the bottom 20% in terms of their vocabulary!
This concept of "visualizing information" seems very new, but in many ways, it's really just making a map of information and turning it into knowledge that is visual and easy to grasp.
Changing the subject, the concept of peer production and sharing as we see in Wikipedia, as described by Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks has a particular appeal to the digital generation. I've edited a few Wikipedia entries. My doing so wasn't based on a desire to share information, but rather to correct misconceptions. Although the digital generation might view Wikipedia as the ultimate source, being from the generation of digital migrants, I still tend to question the information in Wikipedia, and although I can see how many times an entry has been edited, and who has done the editing, I prefer to get my information from known experts. That being said, Wikipedia is a great starting point for looking up something that I don't know anything about.
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