Let the data flow forth.

July 13, 2010 • 12:39 pm • POSTED BY rtashjian

For the visually and verbally inclined, the word “data” is a foreign if not daunting one. But a visit to the blog FlowingData, in which UCLA graduate student Nathan Yau culls displays of data from all over the internet, may leave you much more at peace with number crunching.

Topics covered in Yau’s nearly daily posts range from the fanciful to the serious, from a chart showing How to beat Super Mario Brothers 3 in 11 minutes to an infographic on how much a musician needs to sell online to make minimum wage. It’s an interesting exercise in how visuals can clarify facts—or in some cases, muddle them: Yau does as much reveling in beautiful graphics as he does intelligent questioning on how the data is collected and parsed.

Most exciting are Yau’s posts on infographics that show what raw data can only imply. This elevation map of San Francisco’s prostitution arrests, for example, builds hills and even mountains in the areas of the city where the most arrests take place. The map’s designer, Doug McCune, points out the shadows formed by these peaks, which imply that this issue reaches far further than the crime itself.

If admiring the work of others weren’t enough, Yau has created your.flowingdata.com, which allows users to track data on themselves via Twitter. The program takes the information you tweet, from what you eat to when you go to sleep, and creates beautifully clean word clouds, maps, or time series graphics. Maybe statisticians are aesthetes just like you and me after all.