Data viz in art, sports, & journalism

2025-01-23

Rick Gilmore

Prelude

smalin (2011)

Stiles et al. (2025)

Mortality trends by education level

Novosad, Rafkin, & Asher (2022)

Novosad et al. (2022)

Overview

Announcements

• Exercise 01 due
• Tutorial on capturing images

Last time…

Visualization in government and business

What did we uncover?

• Summary report

Today

Visualization in art, sports, & journalism

Goals

• What sort(s) of visualizations are common in these fields?
• Apply principles of semiotics to these visualizations.
  • Semantics: Mappings between signs and what they signify?
  • Syntax: Rules for arrangement/organization

Data visualization in the arts

Musical notation

https://www.britannica.com/art/musical-notation

Antecdents

https://www.britannica.com/art/musical-notation/Evolution-of-Western-staff-notation

Wikipedia contributors (2025b)

Hebrew trope

Wikipedia contributors (2025a)

Styles

• Style guide

What is being mapped?

• Pitch
• Timing, tempo
• Loudness
• Stylistic properties
• etc.

smalin (2011)

Dance

Flores (2021)

Visual arts

“Blue Skies and Cloud Cover” by Laura Guertin, BTAA Data Viz 2024 Champion

Data visualization in sports

Examples

• https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/analytics/stats-articles/
• https://www.tableau.com/sports-data

Data visualization in journalism

Paris (2025)

Paris (2025)

Data journalism

• The Economist
• The New York Times

https://www.foxnews.com/search-results/search ‘data’

https://www.cnn.com/search?q=data

The Washington Post

Van Dam (2022)

Fowers & Van Dam (2024)

Accuweather.com

https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/state-college/16801/weather-forecast/335315?current=true

Knowable Magazine

https://knowablemagazine.org/

• Graphics library

Main points

Data viz outside \(\Psi\)

• Non-science fields visualize data, too
• Multiple purposes/uses of data viz

Next time

Making (sense of) data

Resources

References

Flores, M. S. (2021). Graph dance 2021 (STEM ingenuity grp 2). Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQYuNKvbPDg

Fowers, A., & Van Dam, A. (2024, December 13). Unraveling america’s great puritan-name resurgence. The Washington Post. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/12/13/virtue-names-hope-faith-charity/

Novosad, P., Rafkin, C., & Asher, S. (2022). Mortality change among less educated americans. American Economic Journal. Applied Economics, 14, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20190297

Paris, F. (2025, January 13). Childhood vaccination rates were falling even before the rise of R.F.K. jr. The New York Times. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/13/upshot/vaccination-rates.html

smalin. (2011). Beethoven, symphony 9, 4th movement (complete) ode to joy, presto, philharmonia baroque. Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljGMhDSSGFU

Stiles, M., O’Key, S., Manley, B., Robinson, L., Merrill, C., Choi, A., … Rigdon, R. (2025, January 8). Visualizing the los angeles wildfires in maps and charts. Retrieved January 12, 2025, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/us/maps-visuals-los-angeles-wildfires-dg/index.html

Van Dam, A. (2022, June 29). Where fun facts are serious business. The Washington Post. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/29/dept-of-data/

Wikipedia contributors. (2025a, January 5). Hebrew cantillation. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_cantillation

Wikipedia contributors. (2025b, January 12). Musical notation. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation