Beautiful Visualizations from Reddit’s DataViz Battle Competition

Gallery of visualizations from the largest open-source community of data-enthusiasts

By 2020, humans will generate a mind-bending 40 yottabyte of data per day. That is enough data to create a line of standard 1 TB hard disks from the Earth to the Sun, 25 times over!*

With so many inputs, a visualization’s form factor is just one of the details that businesses will be mindful of as they try to make sense of the numbers. It’s a skill that requires a mastery of the art itself to build a clutter-free and robust representation of a complex dataset.

There is no better place on the internet to find people master this art than the 13.6 million-member thriving community of data-enthusiasts on one of Reddit’s most popular subreddit: /r/DataIsBeautiful.

Since January 2018, this subreddit has held a monthly data visualization competition for user-submitted data-sets that support interesting themes: like drug harm, traffic accidents in the UK, Pokémon and The Office. At the end of each month, subscribers send their masterpieces to score the highest in three key areas of judgment: analysis, aesthetics, and display. The winners get awarded a Reddit Gold and bragging rights on the community.

The most intriguing part of this competition is a higher preference is given to submissions which have the source code attached with visualization, so it demands the visualizer to responsibly build the program. r/DataIsBeautiful is a treasure trove of ready to use elegant looking, practical, and animated graphics.

If interested, you can find the comprehensive list of popular software, programming languages, and tools employed by the winners of this competition in another article that I had written.

This article is a month-on-month compilation, from January 2018 to February 2019, of each finalists’ beautiful and well-constructed visualizations. Though don’t be tricked by how simple and clean the graphs look as each user had to take many tough decisions to accurately represent complex data; data that often has overarching layers of hierarchies, variables, outliers, and missing cells.

All the submissions are either animated, interactable or in a PDF report, therefore don’t hesitate to visit the threads and play around with the charts yourself.

List of topics:

January 2018: Visualize the Growth Rates of Algae February 2018: Visualize the Legal Status of Same-sex Marriage by US State and Year March 2018: Visualize Over 100,000 Stars April 2018: Visualize Every Line from Every Scene in The Office May 2018: Visualize 1.6 Million Accidents in England, Scotland, and Wales from 2000–2016 June 2018: Visualize The lives, reigns, and deaths of 68 Roman emperors from 26 BC to 395 AD July 2018: Which Birds Prefer Which Seeds August 2018: Visualize TSA Claims September 2018: Visualize Information on all 802 Pokémon October 2018: Visualize 859 Survey Results from /r/travel November 2018: Visualize the List of NASA Astronauts December 2018: Visualize the Freezing and Thawing Cycle of Lake Mendota January 2019: World’s Oldest People February 2019: Visualize Physical Harm and Dependence by Drug

January 2018: Visualize the Growth Rates of Algae

Winner: u/Krawwl(R and ggplot2)

The very first winner of the DataViz Battle took it home by showing the community how simple and effective visualization can convey the most information. The style is most valuable to researchers who would want neat and powerful publishable graphs over fancy graphics any day. By using ggplot2, which is a gold standard today in R, Krawwl was able to give a benchmark to all future submissions.