I am always impressed with what a few hundred dollars and a contest can produce. FlowingData ran a financial crisis visualization contest where they offered $500 to the best global finance infographic and had these judged by a prominent economist. Go and check out the results – you’ll see some very clever ways to unravel the complexity!
USA today produced this interesting interactive map Shifting Religious Identities which renders and makes visual data from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted by Trinity College scholars. The data, report and methodology from/of this survey are available to the public. In addition, the project makes available previous surveys with their associated documentation in their archive.
In Canada, the Statistics Canada Census collects this information by
religious affiliation only, regardless of whether respondents actually practice their religion. Data on the frequency of attendance at religious services have been collected by Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey since 1986. The survey samples adults aged 15 and over living in private households in the 10 provinces (1).
The 2001 overview provides some interesting data, a bit dated, only at the provincial and community scale and not rendered in an interesting way. If you want more detail you must purchase it. A map like the USA Today one could be rendered with what is made available but alas Canadian newspapers are no way near as savvy as the ones in the US when it comes to data visualization, let alone talking about and using statistics!
Contradicting the StatCan quote above,
the census has been collecting data on religion since 1871. Since this question is asked in decennial censuses (every 10 years), it was last asked in 2001 and was not included on the 2006 Census questionnaire. (2)
That question is also only asked to 20% of the population that fills out the Census. Some general information is available for free in the Community Profiles on a location by location basis but not for small census geographies and not for many communities at the same time. Those data at those geographies are available to fee paying citizens.
Perhaps Canadian churches, mosques, synagoges, gudwaras, temples etc. can pass the data donation basket to purchase some of this information!
From Jon Udell:
I spent last weekend in DC at Transparency Camp, which turned out to be one of the best cultural mashups I’ve attended in a long time. If we can get federal policy wonks and Silicon Valley tech geeks working together in the right ways, there’s good reason to hope that our government can become not just more transparent, but also more effective, more collaborative, more democratic. [more…]
I always enjoy looking at data analysis experiments from people who just like to play with numbers and who want to figure odd stuff out. The former fun find today was this gem Books and Music That Make You Dumb where CalTeck student Virgil Griffith
used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.
Griffith is also the creator of
WikiScanner, a database that tracks the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia editors, he revealed that the CIA, the Vatican, and staff of various members of Congress (among others) had made edits on the site to remove potentially sensitive information.
As for the latter, I came across a title called Spamdog Millionaire – The geography of social media spam, which I could not resist reading! In this case Philip Jacob on the StyleFeeder Tech Blog did the following
For each account that we have closed due to spammy activity, I ran their source IP addresses through a GeoIP lookup and graphed the data using DabbleDB (which I had been meaning to play with for some time – more on that later). The result: India, in a word. Pakistan, too.
The visualization was not earth shattering, however the conversation about what to do with that information was infrastructurally and geographically interesting. The discussion centrered on the ethic of firewalling entire countries for the bad behaviours of some, and what it means when bad netizens from certain regions of the world get their nations access to content cut off!
Via: Polymeme
The Journal of Electronic Publishing has a comprehensive article by Peter Suber about the status of Open Access in 2008:
A staggering amount of energy was poured into implementing open access (OA) in 2008. This is an attempt to show its depth and breadth, while admitting that the full story can’t be captured in one article. There’s a lot of detail here, but it’s selective and I’ve tried to present just the highlights of 2008 in nine categories, with a 10th section for highlights of the highlights. To keep it within bounds, I’ve omitted some sections I’ve formerly included, such as open education, open access for public-sector information, and the universe of wikis. As always, apologies to the many projects I couldn’t include. [more…]
This is a great way to make a complex document – a national budget or a Stimulus Package – tangible and accessible. I think newspapers are starting to compete with each other as we are starting to see some great on-line visualizations, New York Times, USA Today and now the Washington Post.
I think the following viz would be even better if the image was hyperlinked to the actual budget document and each bubble took you to the section it represents. But alas! This stuff is hard work and this image is a fine start!
via – Flowing Data
Visualization of the US Stimulus Package
Zara over on CivicAccess.ca forwarded the following Free the Facts story to the list. It is a really great way to get the issue across. I also love flickr being used in that way!
I have been neglectful of this wonderful space and am now getting back to it! As a warmer upper, Hugh, suggested that I post the following that I sent to the CivicAccess.ca list. I have been doing lots of thinking in this area, and I have decided to pursue a PHD on the topic of data access in Canada and hope to share some of my readings & findings as I go along.
In addition, I have been reading lots of great data laden reports in public health, on the topic of quality of life, and collecting data from a multitude of sources that I will get to talking about at some point. Until then you can read some of the documents and reports that I have tagged here and here.
Thinking about data
So these days I have to write a proposal, and it involves data, infrastructures, and geographic imagination. And as I was reading an article about criminological data models, governmentality, and biopolitics I came across this fellow Ian Hacking.
Prof. Hacking wrote about how:
- statistical probability came to be in the 17th century;
- the science of prediction and probability shaped categorizations of people into this and into that,
- those categories that did not exist before the statistical analysis, came to become social realities and
- probability can allow you to predict occurrences within a population according to a set of probabilities but alas at the scale of the individual things are totally random!
Ian Hacking is a Canadian Philosopher and a fellow at the College de France – the only anglo accepted thus far – same schools as Michel Foucault.
Why do I care and why am I sharing this? Well, it has to do with access to data and who is creating the categories we come to live by and believe, what it means when government rationalization comes in the form of statistics discussing populations, and that only the government and wealthy organizations have access to the means to those rationalizations.
During the course of proposal writing I re-read the Chapter on the Census, Map and Museum in Benedict Anderson’s Book Imagined Communities. He discusses how these three institutions were instrumental at framing the colonial gaze in Asia. He also explained that these institutions told us more about the colonial mentalité and less about those they being counting, mapping and whose artifacts got collected. Finally, he demonstrated how these institutions and the categories, territories and anthropoligies eventually got believed by the local, re-puporsed, acted and performed in reality, eventually, becoming ancestors. Bref – manufacturing an odd imagination of who one is. Those who counted, mapped and assembled got to tell the stories. And it is these stories that left traces.
After reading about Ian Hacking’s work, I listened to a CBC ideas interview with him. Brilliant! He discusses taming chance, statistical thinking, normativity, wanting to be normal and adapting to categories which make up people and shape a type of social reality. Access to data I think is about enabling more than a few to question, assess and shape reality. It is also about questioning who has the monopoly on the data that allow us to interpolate the terrain of our geographic imagination – who we are, our identity, issues, how we see ourselves.
Andrew Pickering, who studies the sociology of science, was also interviewed by Paul Kennedy in the same Ideas program, and he brought up Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomad science vs royal science. The latter a science that continues to support the known and accepted ways of doing things the former a more distributed form of science out of the academe. I think web 2.0, open access, open source, open data are about nomad science – which i will explore a little more.
I then listened to Brian Wynne, a Prof. of Science Studies in the same ideas series but a different show who discussed how science and technology somehow are beyond the realm of politics. He discusses in his work on The Public Value of Science how some sciences are imagined, how these are delusions, and are provocations and how these are constructed in the public mind.
I am trying, in my own work, to get at the idea that data help us form a picture of reality, and the more of us that get the opportunity to play with them, learn about them, value them, the more pictures we may create that may invert, contest and change something, question what we are currently being told in an educated way, wonder about what we are not told, what is silenced or worse just plain ignored, how our imagination is shaped, ways we may want to shape it and some new social realities we may want to aim for.
Or to use a term from a lecture given by Darin Barney, I think data are part of the means by which we can do citizenship, doing citizenship involves judging and acting on that judgement, and I believe that data are an integral part of making good judgement upon which to act.
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as an FYI The entire CBC lecture series on How to Think about Science is just plain great.
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