Mission: You have a lot of data, and you need to make it all visible, and usable in a relatively small space. What do you do, sunshine? Just dump it into a bar graph and call it an early morning? Create multiple reports that digest parts of the data? Create a fairly cool little set of applets?
It is the last that the people doing the "Secret Life of Numbers" study did. They are attempting to track the "popularity" of all the numbers from one to 100000. While the ... usefulness of such a study is left to the reader, the data, and more importantly, how they display the data is incredible. You can rapidly find numbers you're interested in, change the scale of the graphs and navigate this huge data set quickly, and dare I say it, intuitively. Well done, I think.
Boringly enough, the most popular number for their 2002 data set is 2000.
Print | posted on Sunday, May 28, 2006 12:16 AM