{"id":12459,"date":"2015-04-08T12:21:37","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T11:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=7245"},"modified":"2021-08-18T20:35:55","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T18:35:55","slug":"the-joy-division-of-visualization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/the-joy-division-of-visualization.html","title":{"rendered":"The Joy (Division) of Visualization"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This morning, I had one of those serendipity moments.<\/p>\n<p>As I was waiting at the bus stop to take my daughter to school, I noticed one of the other pupils was wearing a t-shirt with the classic cover of Joy Division&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unknown_Pleasures\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Unknown Pleasures<\/a>&#8221; album.<\/p>\n<p>The record came out in 1979, when I was about the same age as the girl wearing the t-shirt, and I remember having a huge poster-sized version on my\u00a0wall at University.<\/p>\n<p>A quick Google search on my phone, and I quickly discovered\u00a0that it wasn&#8217;t the random scribbles\u00a0of a graphic artist that I had always assumed.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, it turns out that it&#8217;s\u00a0a reversed graphic from The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy\u00a0by\u00a0Harold D. Craft, Jr, as explained by <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/ChristiansenJen\">Jen Christiansen<\/a> in this\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/sa-visual\/2015\/02\/18\/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video\/\">Scientific American blog post<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/PSR_B1919%2B21\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CP 1919<\/a>, are here superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds. They are caused by rapidly spinning neutron star.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words, it&#8217;s one of the earliest examples of data visualization that I ever fell in love with &#8212; long before I ever realized that I&#8217;d be working in analytics.<\/p>\n<p>Back when I was a penniless student, I decided that going out was more important than\u00a0buying\u00a0the album, but thanks to modern technology, I was listening to it (for the first time ever!) on Spotify seconds after I dropped my daughter off&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The type of visualization used isn&#8217;t really considered best practice (potentially important information is too easily hidden between the curves in front), but it should be possible to recreate it using modern analytics tools.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joy Division&#8217;s Unknown Pleasures album turns out to be a classic example of data visualization<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[100,349,362,541,667,1124],"class_list":["post-12459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dataviz-2","tag-analytics","tag-data-visualization","tag-dataviz","tag-graphics","tag-joy-division","tag-visualization"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3eX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20665,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12459\/revisions\/20665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}