The 2019 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards Shortlist came out this week – these are some of our favourites.
The Room Of Change
As data visualisations go, they don’t come much more epic than this. Commissioned for the Milan Design Triennale, the Room of Change (pictured above) is a 30-metre long visualisation of how the world has changed over multiple centuries, conceived by Milan/New York based datavis studio Accurat (@accuratstudio).
The chart covers everything from environmental changes to technology, eclipses and social change, with each custom chart getting a band that stretches the entire wall. The unusual charts have a strong graphic quality, like art or fashion design:
You can see the full legend here.
It’s probably one of those ‘you had to be there’ pieces, but even seeing the photos you can imagine the sense of scale and epochal change you would feel while walking the length of the room.
She Said More
This series of visualisations by @CathSleeman explores media coverage of women in the creative industries. By analysing over half a million articles from the Guardian, Sleeman measures how representation is reflected in language. The charts are programmatically made using SVG <textPath> elements.
There’s good and bad news. On the up side, an analysis of pronouns indicates that coverage of women in the creative industries has finally caught up with representation:
(Though as you can see, representation percentages are unequal and flatlining).
On the other hand, looking closer at the kind of coverage women are getting, there are some less promising signs:
Words significantly more likely to follow ‘she’ are mostly those to do with immediate physical and verbal reactions, “Smiles” “sighs” “cries” “giggles” and “gestures” for example, whereas words to do with in-depth creative processes are less likely to be associated with women: “developed”, “launched”, “considered”, “planned”, “achieved”, and so on.
DrWhy.AI – Data Visualisations For Explainable AI
This collection of datavis tools for DrWhy.ai helps solve a big problem in artificial intelligence – do we know how our AI arrived at its decisions? Most AI is a black box – put in inputs, get back outputs. As more and more decisions are made by programs though, people are starting to ask for the reasoning behind the decisions – in other words ‘Explainable Artificial Intelligence’ (XAI).
Designed by Hanna Piotrowska (@hannapio), the charts aim to make AI processes as understandable and clear as they can be (for such complex processes), while giving a visual identity to the DrWhy brand.
Oh and we still love Sonja Kuijpers’ ‘A View On Despair’. We just already wrote about it at length here.
