Friday, May 15, 2009

The Japanese Census


This is an incredible visualization of Japanese census data rendered by Soma. The first thing to understand is the Japanese census is a little different than our own. Here is Soma's description.
Let's jump right into this: Japan has the absolute best census in the history of my known world. Not only does it include normal things like age, sex, and the height of each of your pets, but it also legitimizes the gossipy question of What Are You Doing Right Now? Japan slapped a bunch of people with notebooks and a sacred Numbers Mission: keep a log of what you do during the day, in fifteen minute intervals. And those people did!
I've lost a lot of hours playing with these graphs!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

This is awesome! At first I thought it was made using gChart, a jQuery plugin which utilizes the Google charts web service, but it turns out it's done with Processing, a programming language that Steve Ersinghaus has vowed to learn. Thanks, Hendree.

fake said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
fake said...

Jim, do you know anything about Processing? Does it handle network/relational diagrams well? I might be interested in joining Steve. Regardless, the graphics are really smooth on this site!

Tinyc Tim said...

 
Have you ever run across something new and then later encountered it again but couldn't retrace your steps back to your first encounter?

I was looking at some web page and was trying to "view the source code," only to learn it was written in something called Processing. I'd never heard of Processing and the page was "compiled" (not sure this is the right word) so I was not able to figure out what the source code looked like.

It was a really cool page and I wanted to learn how it was built.

Now I see Processing in action again. Wow!

Maybe I'll get lucky and Steve Ersinghaus will be familiar w/ a few things he's seen that were done w/ Processing. The odds one of them is what I can't remember may be small, but you can always hope.