The Global Sociology Blog

Apparently: State of The Union Speeches Reading Levels from SocProf on Vimeo. The interactive graphic from the Guardian is here. The Flesch-Kincaid reading level measurement is here. The real question is why this is happening, especially considering the fact that Americans are more educated now than they were in the days of Washington or Madison. [...]

Check out this great infographic from The Census Bureau on migration: [Source: U.S. Census Bureau] There is a lot that is interesting here. First of all, the percentage of US population that is foreign-born is lower now than it was in the 19th century so, even though the foreign-born population is larger in numbers, because [...]

I found this interesting set of data via The World Bank Dataviz Tumblr: some good interactive visualizations based on the Open Budget Survey (full report here): Open Budget Survey from SocProf on Vimeo. Here are some static images. The map: The rankings: The overall view: The categorized rankings from the report: The infographic: These are all [...]

I have been blogging a lot on guns lately, and there have been a lot of interesting visualizations offered on this topic. Yet, I had never seen anything like the visualization below (via Nathan Yau). Take a look: US Gun Deaths – Stolen Years from SocProf on Vimeo.

A while back, I reviewed a book on the sociology of plastic surgery, Making The Cut. That book was prescient and the trends it discussed have not abated in the context of the cosmetic surgical culture: “In the new economy nothing is more sexy than surgery. From Botox to lipo to tummy tucks and mini-facelifts, [...]

Via Nathan Yau (who did write the book on visualization and has a great website to go along with it), this very interesting and interactive visualization of the world’s billionaires: Billionaires 2013 from SocProf on Vimeo. Here are a few static images. The rankings: The bar charts: The ranking shifts over one year: The plots: [...]

Here is an interesting data visualization from Der Spiegel, on the rise of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), the German far-right party. As you can see from the map and the post title, I don’t think the choice of brown dots as color scheme is random. It is a rather simple data visualization but it [...]

I love soccer, or as we Europeans call it, football. I also like network visualizations. So, how can I not love this network visualization of Ballon D’Or votes. If you don’t know what the Ballon D’Or is, check this out. Quick explanation: “The above visualization shows the network of votes of the Ballon d’Or 2012. [...]

This is an interactive infographic, so, here is a quick video: The Power Elite – Chinese Style from SocProf on Vimeo. I initially found this in a blog post in Le Monde but the original article is here. Note the consistency in color schemes in the different visualizations. A few snapshots (not interactive, of course): Also: [...]

A few publications (here and here, for instance) decided to do some raw data collection (which would need to be refined and correlated with other variables to be truly useful). Slate, especially, has produced a simple interactive graphic regarding gun deaths since Newtown, which has received much visibility: Less spectacular but as important is this [...]

This is awesome. I have yet to watch Season 3, which I am saving for a long transatlantic flight, but I love this graphic representation of killing in the Walking Dead.

So, the MOOC is over. It has been a very interesting six week but I made it. I completed all the projects and I am now waiting for my completion certificate. So, what has this MOOC experience been like? To recap, the MOOC I took was Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization, offered through the [...]

One of my classmates suggested I unstack the bars in my previous visualization of international comparison of social mobility, by gender and class of origin. He was right, the pattern I noted becomes very clear once the bars were unstacked. Click on the images for their full sizes (or click here and here): The bar [...]

Visualizations are not just for social scientists with data on their hands. They can be used to analyze literature too. After all, most fiction writing is writing about social relationships. Take this example from a Shakespeare play (click on the image or here for the full thing): You can clearly see where the big drama / [...]

Ok, so, I am getting towards the end of my MOOC and for our last project, we were asked to come up with our own idea and topics and think about how to visualize them and basically have these visualizations tell a story. Since I had just received my brand new copy of the Economic [...]