the art of data...

turning whispers into important conversations

This little data project began with a podcast episode of Stats + Stories. I am working on projects where the textual and visual elements are powerfully integrated. Always open to learning something new or to be inspired from a collective of voices across a variety of disciplines. I say this all of the time from the stage — what we do is either enable others to build stories or we are in conversation for our own creations — narrative creations. It isn’t about the tools, it is about where they inspire us to travel.

Maybe you do the same thing but I keep a little notebook with interesting statistics. A journal of ideas for bigger conversations and deeper research. Chris Jordan embodies what is possible if we pay attention.

Chris Jordan…”Depicts 50,000 plastic bags, equal to the average number of pieces of floating plastic per square mile in the Pacific Ocean (2010 statistic)”— based on photo by Bryant Austin

I thought of this dataset among many because I recently taught a class where we were working with tar files.

I like the ease of not only opening these files in Terminal but the possibility of creating a collection directly on your local hardrive.

tar -xvf 0189571.1.1.tar (the bolded bit is the file name).

Now you have the files unzipped and ready for action…

Now we can explore the dataset. I suggest you head over to QGIS and using the GroupStats plug-in, you are able to format and explore your table for visualization…

Next we can query the dataset once we understand the columns and rows.