7 days of r/dataisbeautiful: a visualization that shows that data is beautiful

January 29, 2015

Originally posted on January 29th, 2015.


That’s a word cloud. It took me about 30 seconds to build.

It shows the relative word frequencies in the titles of posts to r/dataisbeautiful over the last 7 days.

“Citi”
One thing that jumps out immediately is the high occurrence of the word “Citi.”

“Citi” is presumably a reference to New York’s bike sharing service that is sponsored by Citibank.

It turns out that there were 4 data visualization posts about Citi Bikes last week:

How we talk about data
The word cloud suggests some interesting patterns about how data visualizations are talked about.

But it is difficult to draw clear conclusions from a word cloud because it relies on the viewer being able to compare different font sizes – which is a hard thing to do.

To make it easier for you, here is a bar chart of the top 10 words ranked by relative frequency.

r/dataisbeautiful

Build a word cloud in 30 seconds
I was inspired to give this a go after reading today’s tutorial that shows how to use Import.io Magic to extract written content from a blog and then visualize the results in a word cloud, in the shape of a logo.

r/dataisbeautiful

It was very quick. It took longer to write this post than it did to create the visualization.

Originally posted on January 29th, 2015.


That’s a word cloud. It took me about 30 seconds to build.

It shows the relative word frequencies in the titles of posts to r/dataisbeautiful over the last 7 days.

“Citi”
One thing that jumps out immediately is the high occurrence of the word “Citi.”

“Citi” is presumably a reference to New York’s bike sharing service that is sponsored by Citibank.

It turns out that there were 4 data visualization posts about Citi Bikes last week:

How we talk about data
The word cloud suggests some interesting patterns about how data visualizations are talked about.

But it is difficult to draw clear conclusions from a word cloud because it relies on the viewer being able to compare different font sizes – which is a hard thing to do.

To make it easier for you, here is a bar chart of the top 10 words ranked by relative frequency.

r/dataisbeautiful

Build a word cloud in 30 seconds
I was inspired to give this a go after reading today’s tutorial that shows how to use Import.io Magic to extract written content from a blog and then visualize the results in a word cloud, in the shape of a logo.

r/dataisbeautiful

It was very quick. It took longer to write this post than it did to create the visualization.

bg effect