From charts that show how swearing in public has changed over time to a graph tallying the crimes that have put people behind bars in New York, a new site is aiming to make data visualization more accessible and shareable. Dadaviz (its name a play on a portmanteau of “data” and “viz,” for “visualization”) is a long scroll of curated content that communicates information as dynamic images.
Creators Jishai Zevers and Leon Markovitz are, according to Kill Screen, hoping to make Dadaviz the “YouTube of data visualization.” Mostly when you find data visualized on the internet, it’s as a jpeg, which takes away from what makes the form unique. Aficionados are actually quick to differentiate between data visualizations, which are dynamically generated, and their more static sibling, infographics, which are created by hand (via a mouse and Photoshop). As Markovitz told the Next Web: “There is a real fight by datavizers to create a separation between data viz and infographics. In essence, data viz is less labor-intensive and more data-intensive, whereas infographics are more labor-intensive and less data-intensive.”
Dadaviz is still in its beginning stages, with the addition of new graphics currently limited to a small group of users, but plans to open it wider are in the works. In the meantime, anyone can join and start sharing what’s there, although the interface is a little cumbersome. You’re thrown right into the mix without an introductory page, and the Tumblr-like scrolling can be a bit jarring (those who get vertigo easily should use the arrow tabs). The lack of a search function also limits the site to being an expression of the most recent, compelling examples of data visualization, rather than a resource for tracking down specific information. For now the hundreds of selections are heavy on the clean and direct, without much in the way of elaborate illustration or fancy designs. Yet as data visualization becomes a more active component of expressing and understanding statistics, Dadaviz could be a valuable resource for engaging with it through real-time sharing.
Find more examples of data visualization at Dadaviz.
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