Culture - Chart Porn

Culture Archive:

Music Sales on the Rise

5 Mar 2013

Music sales rose last year for the first time in over a decade. Click below for a video explanation over at the Economist. Huffington has some more of the numbers.

I look at this chart and wonder who is still buying all that physical music? Must be the same people who are responsible for this list of top ten selling albums I have never heard.

(1) Comment

You are unlikely to die… oh wait

In: Culture Science Source: Economist

15 Feb 2013

Which of these do you worry about?

(5) Comments

Timeline of World Religions

In: Culture History

29 Jan 2013

I’m not expert enough on any of these to say whether this is accurate or not. A clear explanation of what the different colors and line widths would have been helpful.

Some other versions:

(9) Comments

Billionaires

In: Culture Finance Interactive Source: Ritholtz

25 Jan 2013

Bloomberg has several interactive tools for filtering and ranking the the world’s billionaires.

If you click on any of them, individual profiles come up, like for Carlos Slim":

You can plot them by industry, gender, number of children and all kinds of other variables.

No Comments

California Shooting Location Map

In: Culture Maps

2 Jan 2013

An amusing map from 1927, showing which areas of California could be used to film movies that you wanted to look like other parts of the world.

(2) Comments

Video Games (1975-2011)

In: Culture History Internet/tech

21 Dec 2012

Games by genre, and games by platform. Labeling the axis might have been useful – I assume it’s supposed to be percent of total, with the space at top “other”? I tried to find the original source for this, but had no luck.

(3) Comments

Oskar Fischinger

In: Culture Graphic Design (general) History Video

18 Dec 2012

I dabble in VJ’ing, and it’s amazing what you can do with todays tools, like Resolume. But take a look at what Oskar Fischinger did back in 1938 with pieces of paper hanging from wires in his synesthetic interpretation of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. Amazing. Actually, it’s kind of embarrassing. We are so spoiled.

No Comments

100 Riffs (a Brief History of Rock and Roll)

In: Culture Innovative Internet/tech

18 Dec 2012

A cool real time synced visualization of guitar riffs and their matching tabs notations. Apparently the Soundslice site let’s you annotate any youtube video in such a way. I love internet functionality mashups like this.

No Comments

17 Ways to Tie Shoes

In: Culture Science

12 Dec 2012

A practical combination of diagram and example. Simple is usually best.

(1) Comment

How Frequent is Your Birthday?

In: Culture Science

28 Nov 2012

Very nice heat chart. I wonder what would happen if you filtered by geography? An awful lot of people I knew in northern NY were born 9 months after the cold dark winter.

More colorful Tableau version:

(8) Comments

History of Film

In: Culture

5 Nov 2012

I don’t know. These amorphous charts with somewhat arbitrary categorization and selection bias just don’t do it for me. They are nice for reminding you of films – and maybe that’s useful now that you can’t wander the isles of blockbuster anymore – but that’s about it.