The “Information is Beautiful” Awards Are Out — Here Are This Year’s Best Data Visualizations

Two of the winners are the work of Chinese students.

Data visualization tools let anyone sort and show information at a glance. Looking at a picture is nearly always easier than reading down rows and columns of numbers and words. For news organizations and research institutes in particular, visualizing data and information has become a vivid, effective way to tell a story and package it.

The 2017 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards were announced recently in Britain, and two entries from China took prizes: Zhu Tianhang of the Nanjing University of the Arts won bronze for Best Non-English Entry with The Principle of Thangka Iconometry (《唐卡造像原理》), and Li Peijie won bronze for Best Community Choice with Han Opera (《汉剧》).

The awards began in 2012, set up by David McCandless, a journalist and data observer at the Information is Beautiful website, together with Aziz Cami, then creative director at the market research firm Kantar. They are open to students, independent practitioners, media outlets and non-governmental organizations anywhere in the world.

This is the sixth edition. Earlier years sorted the prizes by format — infographics, interactive visualizations, data visualization tools and so on. This year every entry was placed in one of eight categories: arts, current affairs and politics, business, environment, humanitarian, science and technology, sports and games, and special. The test was whether a piece “does a good job of showing the data behind its subject.”

Arts, Entertainment & Pop Culture

Gold: The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big

By Russell Goldenberg & Dan Kopf

Published on: The Pudding, a visual-essay magazine

On July 17, 2013, the American band Sylvan Esso played a small show in New York, in a room that held no more than 250 people. It was one of more than 7,000 bands that played New York that year. About two years later Sylvan Esso played the city again, this time in a venue for more than 3,000 people, and sold it out.

That gave Russell Goldenberg and Dan Kopf their idea: chart 75,000 shows across three years in New York and work out how likely a band is to make it big.

The piece uses the size of the room as a stand-in for a band’s success. It gathers the capacities of the venues played by 21 bands that did “make it,” measures how long each took to get there, and draws every band’s trajectory — with a search box so readers can look up the bands they care about.

According to the music-events site Songkick, of the 7,000 bands that played small New York rooms holding fewer than 700 people in 2013, fewer than half played the city again between 2014 and October 2016. Among those that did, only 400 moved up to rooms holding more than 700, and 21 drew audiences of more than 3,000 — the line the piece draws for “success.”

The authors used circles of different sizes for venue capacity, the length of a line for how long a band took to “make it,” and color for the kind of show: green for shows the band played, red for shows it headlined.

(Click here for the full chart)

Current Affairs & Politics

Gold: On Their Way: the Journey of Foreign Fighters

By Density Design Lab

Published on: La Lettura

Set against the tangled background of violent religious radicalization, this map lays out how the Islamic State’s foreign fighters made their way to caliphate territory, and the journeys of those who came back. Everything it cites is publicly available data.

Further layers show how the phenomenon relates to each country’s distance from the destination, and how a country’s total population relates to its Muslim population.

The piece ran in La Lettura, the culture supplement of Italy’s Corriere della Sera.

(Click here for the full chart)

People, Language & Identity

Gold: How do you draw a circle?

By Thu-Huong Ha & Nikhil Sonnad

Published on: Quartz

In November 2016 Google released Quick, Draw!, an entertaining doodling game that is really a tool for training Google’s AI. At first glance it is only a game: it shows you a random noun and gives you 20 seconds to draw it. You sketch the outline with your mouse, and Quick, Draw! decides whether it looks like the real thing.

That set Thu-Huong Ha and Nikhil Sonnad thinking. What might the game reveal about cultures around the world? Does the country you live in, or the language you speak, change the way you draw?

The two authors, from the American digital news outlet Quartz, picked the circle — a mark at once classic and universal — to answer the question.

(Click here for the full chart)

Environment & Maps

Gold: 1812: When Napoleon Ventured East By the editorial team of TASS, Russia Published on: TASS

This is a special history project from the Russian news agency TASS, devoted to one of the most dramatic pages in Russian history: the Patriotic War of 1812.

It builds on the map of Napoleon’s eastward march that the French engineer Charles Joseph Minard drew in 1869, which used statistical charts to show the Russian campaign and every stage that ended in the defeat of Napoleon’s army. TASS followed the route of the French army and set Minard’s figures against the latest findings and estimates, telling the war’s turning points along two parallel tracks.

(Click here for the full experience)

Humanitarian & Global

Gold: The Shadow Peace - The Nuclear Threat

By Neil Halloran

The Shadow Peace is a documentary series that uses a distinctive kind of cinematic data visualization to open up hard questions about war, peace and humanity. “The Nuclear Threat,” the first episode, argues for the importance of keeping the peace in the nuclear age and looks at what might make the future more peaceful.

(Click here to watch the documentary)

Science & Technology

Gold: Science Paths

By Kim Albrecht

How does a scientist’s work shape, or even change, the scientific enterprise? Are there performance measures for it, and patterns that can be predicted? Can we say in advance when a scientist will do their best work?

With those questions in mind, Kim Albrecht’s team studied how productivity and impact evolve over the careers of thousands of scientists, taking the publication records of scientists in seven disciplines as its sample, linking each paper to its long-term effect on the field and quantifying that effect through citation counts.

They found that the most influential work of a scientist’s career is in fact scattered at random across a working life.

(Click here for the full chart)

Sports, Games & Leisure

Gold: Rhythm of Food

By Moritz Stefaner, Yuri Vishnevsky, Simon Rogers, Alberto Cairo et al.

Tastes in food keep shifting, but how do you pin the shift down? The Truth & Beauty lab, working with the Google News Lab, visualized 12 years of American Google searches for food to trace how appetites have changed.

The authors took more than 130,000 data points from those 12 years and laid them out in a series of ring charts. Each ring is divided evenly into 52 segments for the 52 weeks of the year, each year gets its own color, and every week’s block of color over the 12 years sits in its segment according to search volume: the farther from the center, the more searches.

For Moritz Stefaner the most interesting thing in the radial charts is the seasonal rhythm of food: “We saw that every vegetable, fruit, dish or drink has its own signature seasonal pattern — some tied to the natural seasons, some closely linked to particular holidays, some popular all year round.”

(Click here for the full experience)

Special

Gold: Data Sketches in Twelve Installments

By Nadieh Bremer & Shirley Wu

This was a year-long collaboration in 12 installments, each taking about a month.

Every month Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu chose a topic, made a range of visualizations around it, and wrote down their design, their process, and what they experienced and learned. The topics ran from film, books and music to nostalgia, the Olympics and nature.

(Click here for the full set of images)

Studio of the Year

This went to Density Design Lab, the team behind On Their Way: the Journey of Foreign Fighters, the current affairs and politics gold winner mentioned above.

Best Non-English Entry

Gold: Berlin Marathon 2016: how fast your city runs

By Julius Troeger, Andre Paetzold

Published on: the website of the Berliner Morgenpost

An interactive map showing how fast all 35,827 runners who finished the 2016 Berlin Marathon moved through the city, each runner a single point on the map. Users can also enter their own personal best and compare it with the results from the race.

(Click here for the full experience)

Bronze: The Principle of Thangka Iconometry

By Zhu Tianhang

This was the author’s third-year coursework for an information-graphics design class. He gathered material from ancient texts and documentaries and embedded it in the mandala, a classic thangka composition, until the chart itself became one giant “thangka.”

He wanted the composition to carry a sense of the sacred and to lead viewers into thangka painting and Tibetan culture. The accompanying diagrams chart the proportions of Buddhist figures as set out in old Tibetan Buddhist texts on iconometry, using the modern Western idea of a measuring scale to make those proportions visible.

(Click here for the full set of images)

Best Community Choice

Bronze: Han Opera

By Li Peijie

In Han Opera, Li Peijie, a student at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, uses four images to introduce the history and geographic spread of Han opera, one of China’s native theatrical forms, along with the lore of its clown roles — their basic footwork and their five types.

The full list of winners of the 2017 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards is here.