Wyoming Humanities Network

As someone who spends most of her time wading around in words, I’m always intrigued by creative visual representations of research. In word form, for instance, statistics can lose me pretty quickly. But I could look at the Telegraph’s selection of maps from The Atlas of the Real World for hours.  Countries shrink or swell based on whatever criterion each map illustrates, which allows for striking visual comparisons of, say, wealth in the year 1, or the prevalence of HIV, or how much alcohol is drunk in various nations. Stats have never been so much fun!

I had always (naively) pictured the United States Census as a mind-numbing collection of columns and columns of figures, but no, they have fabulous multicolored maps, too! And the whole gosh darn thing is available online. Granted, it’s in massive pdf documents instead of the easily clickable flash jobs we’re used to by now, but it’s there nonetheless, and free for the lookin’. So if you’re curious where  grandparents tend to raise their grandchildren, or which states have the most college-educated women, you can find out at a glance, instead of wading through the data in one of its more migraine-inducing forms.

Of course, if you’re craving more up-to-date government info, you can visit Capitol Words, a website maintained by the Sunlight Foundation, which, in their own words, “supports, develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people.” Capitol Words generates a different kind of map entirely: a word cloud that illustrates which thirty words were most frequently in the Congressional Record in any given day, week, month, or year. Not surprisingly, today’s top word (and the top word for the last month) is “health.” Capitol Words also illustrates the most and least vocal state delegations, as well as listing the ten quietest and most vocal lawmakers.