Insight

ICYMI – Our IIB Awards interactives top picks

This week, we continue on our quest to pick and choose the most interesting content in the IIB awards that makes our team at infogr8 tick, this time diving into interactives..

Ben’s picks

Homicide Monitor

Igarapé Institute

You may be pleased to know that homicide rates across the UK are in sharp decline. In fact, the rate has halved from the levels seen in 2002, down to just one death per year per 100,000 inhabitants. Unfortunately, the picture is not so rosy when you look at many countries across Latin America and the Caribbean which typically have some of the highest rates on Earth. The Homicide Monitor, an interactive globe from the Igarapé Institute allows us to explore these tragic patterns, and helps bring this unsettling subject to the world’s attention. We originally featured it in Vol 16 of our weekly ICYMI  and we still think it’s dead good.

Africa is probably home to some of the most impressive beasts currently wondering the planet, and it is saddening that many may not be around for much longer. This beautiful interactive piece from RJ Andrews shows where each critter can be found, and how critical their population levels currently are. We original discovered this back in May, and featured it in Vol 17 of our weekly roundup of best bits. Lets hope that generations from now can continue to marvel at these extraordinary animals in their natural home, rather than just on a computer screen in pieces such as this.

Aaron’s picks

My Premiere League Life

IIB Studio

Many of today’s top football teams have an extensive history stretching way back before our year of birth. Have you ever wondered how your favourite team fared before you were around, or how successful they have been since you begin supporting them? A personalised dynamic dashboard by IIB Studio for BBC Sport allows us to see match success, total crowd attendance, trophies won and much more across the history of the club, as well as in the years we have been alive. We originally featured this in Vol 29 of our ICYMI. There’s enough data in here for even the largest football trivia fanatics to go head over heels for, while the clean, simple charts allow even non fans to get a kick out of the information on display.

F1 standings track statistics race calendar

Reuters

There’s more than one F1 super fan data nerd here in the infogr8 studio, which is why we recently decided it examine deaths across the history of the sport in our static data visualisation, End of the Road. Naturally then, we are also big fans of this piece. Reuters have developed this clean, functional microsite presenting the drivers, the team standings and circuits with plenty of statistics to drill down on. We raved about this last month in Vol 37 of our ICYMI. As a further iteration, we’d love to be able to compare the track speeds across one visual but for a top level overview this takes pole position.

David’s picks 

The Counted – People killed by police in the US

The Guardian

Back in Vol 20 of our ICYMI we learned that there have been more fatal police shootings in the the US during the first 24 days of this year, than England and Wales has seen in the last 24 years. The Guardian have decided to get right to the heart of this issue and has created an interactive database of all those who lost their lives to police officer intervention throughout 2015. The stunning use of photography and personal stories behind each case really took our breath away, making this more impactful than statistics alone could ever manage.

The True Size of Countries on the Mercator Map Projection
James Talmage, Damon Maneice

It all started with The True Size of Africa map, and since then there have been much discussion over the relative size of various countries against other land masses. Misconceptions are due to the Mercator Projection, a method of visualising the Earth’s spherical service onto a flat plane. This greatly distorts and exaggerates the size of countries away from the Equator, leaving us with an inaccurate impression when we view maps in textbooks. Well, with the magic of technology we can hopefully put all discussions to rest. We originally discovered this data driven website from James Talmage and Damon Manic back in ICYMI Vol 34 and we loved how allows us to simply pick up any country and place it next to another, while automatically scaling the size to allow for accurate comparisons. Greenland is often portrayed as a humungous land mass close to the North Poll, but move it closer to the equator and you’ll see that it’s just taking the pie.

Maria’s picks

A world of belonging

Airbnb

Histography
Matan Stauber

What would Wikipedia entries look like if they were displayed as individual blips along a single, 14 billion year timeline? Matan Stauber obviously asked himself the same thing, and to find out he has created Histography, an interactive timeline mentioned in our ICYMI Vol 38, that plots key moments from the birth of the Universe, up to the Google developed driverless cars. What really stroke me was the execution of the project whilst dealing with large sets of data and still being presented in a visually mesmerising way. We can even categorise events to focus on our particular area of interest, and hop straight to the Wikipedia entry from where it originated. Even the most hardcore general knowledge masters will surely find a wealth of information here to keep them entertained.