Few things bring as much joy to a BookNet-filled heart as an elegant data visualization. The New York Times has been pushing the envelope of eye-grabbing graphing lately. A great example is this graph of movie box office data. It wins points for comprehensiveness (going back to 1986, so you can see that Out of Africa and The Colour Purple were in theatres at the same time) and interactivity (click on a chart area for an NYT-fueled plot reminder if you can’t remember the gist of Deep Cover or Ladybugs).
Even better, the total visualization tells a story that the individual data-points cannot, like the increasing variance between Summer/December hit seasons vs. the rest of the year. (Courtesy of Boing Boing.)
