Big Data
IBM reported in 2012 that 90% of the worlds data had been created since 2010. All that data written on DVDs would be a stack that reaches to the moon and back.
What does all this data mean? How can it be used? What sorts of tools can we use to visualize it? Explore the examples and sites shown below.
Baby Name Voyager
Lots of number data has been turned into visual information in the Baby Name Voyager, showing popularity in names over the last 130 years. For instance, consider the popularity of the name "Jesus" which illustrates immigration trends from Spanish speaking countries.
Try typing in "Mohammed" or "Forrest" and note the sudden changes. Ask your students why they think there might have been these sudden changes. Ask them to forecast what they think the graph for the girl's name "Sunshine" looks like, and why.
If you are teaching an introductory programming course (e.g. CS1 or CS2), consider retrieving the data and giving something similar as a programming assignment.
Google's Ngram Viewer
Google's NGram viewer is a time machine for words that allows you to explore 5 billion words from 5 million books over 5 centuries. Take a look at: http://books.google.com/ngrams
At right is the result of a search on the phrase "computational thinking". Selecting the year ranges below the graph takes you to the books where this phrase was found. What do you think the following searches would look like: Olympics, Race, Black Lives Matter, Salsa, Ketchup
GoodFilms
See which movies are re-watched the most (x-axis) and which are the most critically acclaimed (y-axis) at Goodfilms. You can filter by where you can watch the movie (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) The bigger the dot, the more reviews it has. Hovering over a dot reveals which movie it is, along with a small graph of other movies that are similar in terms of being rewatched and critically acclaimed. Movies near the upper-right are both rewatched often and critically acclaimed. The opposite is true for the movies in the lower-left!
Google's Earth Engine
See Google's EarthEngine showing a time-lapse sequence of satellite images since 1984 showing changes to the planets surface. There are some set locations such as Las Vegas and the man-made islands of Dubai that show drastic changes, but you can also zoom in on your own location. Do views on glaciers provide evidence of global warming?
Live Flights Radar
At www.flightradar24.com you can see the pattern of flights in the air right now, along with details for each one.
Why do you suppose there are lots of flights in and out of Memphis at night?
Educational Attainment
See the educational attainment in the US by map section. Does this support how you think of different neighborhoods where you live?
Information is Beautiful
Information is Beautiful is a collection of visualizations, with a sampling of them shown here.
Maptive
Maptive.com has a collection of map-based visualizations, such as the ones shown here.
A day in the life of Americans, showing activity throughout the day.
See how the Face of America is changing over time.
See the wind, weather and ocean conditions across the globe.
An exploration of the "Universcale" relative sizes of things, allowing you to zoom in / out.
Gap Minder
Hans Rosling's GapMinder.org allows you to graph real-world data. See also Rosling's TED talks.
Sources
There are many types and examples of visualizations at Information is Beautiful and at Maptive Visualizations
Steve Balmer, who used to be the chief executive at Microsoft, has put together a dataset that allows us to see where all government funding (local, state, federal) goes. See usafacts.org
Project Gutenberg
See the related project Cyberwill (modeled after Joe Zachary's Random Writer) for a PC executable and the data files to generate random text in the style of other texts.Government Data: City of Chicago public data portal, US Government Data.gov, and the US Census Data
Divvy Bikes usage data
See uses of historical Big Data visualizations, along with some modern equivalents
Online book describing how to best visualize data.
DataCounts! gives databases and online tools
See examples of how not to represent data: http://cas.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charting_data/badcharts.shtml
References and more
Information is Beautiful has a helpful list of books on data visualization.
Hacking OKCupid to find true love.
See Alex Pentland's (MIT) 20 min talk about the implications of Big Data.
See the April 6, 2014 NY Times article on 9 potential problems with big data. For instance, "from 2006 to 2011 the United States murder rate was well correlated with the market share of Internet Explorer: Both went down sharply. But it’s hard to imagine there is any causal relationship between the two."
How Unique are You?
Latanya Sweeney's site at dataprivacylab.org/people/sweeney has great examples of this. See for instance aboutmyinfo.org where you can see how unique you are: