Wednesday 20 November 2013

Insights

Every so often, I get a bee in my bonnet about visualisations. Sometimes I even do wanky pie charts making fun of my own frustrations.

But then occasionally, I see something that really works for me. Like this investigation of the Tate collections by Florian Kräutli. Kräutli uses fairly simple graphs to get a feel for the shapes of the collections, and then to drill down into the shapes that strike him as strange (why the bump in 1814? why 'one big balloon and a lot of awful tiny dots'?).


It's a lovely bit of writing and best of all, I learnt things about the Tate collections by the time I got to the end of it, things that I wouldn't have absorbed so markedly if it had just been s short essay. Love it. More, please.

(It's worth noting as well that these visualisations are made using data released by Tate on GitHub.)

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