With the 4th of July coming up our thoughts have been turning to all sorts of data surrounding the nations that we love. While VisualCue is a multinational company this branch (in English, that is,) is based out of the United States.

With that in mind we were talking about different uses for data to give citizens insight into their nations. Of course once we started talking about it around the office we started scouring the Internet for cool examples of what this sort of data could do.

While a lot of the data was pretty controversial and divisive we decided to instead focus on the best sites that just shed interesting light on new patterns of how nations celebrate themselves.

National Anthems from Around the World

Our first visualization comes to us from Chris Ford- a straightforward yet amazingly unique data visualization that had us both smiling and stroking our chins.

Do you see now why we said simple but amazing? A data visualization does not need to be flashy or fancy to be useful. In this case Ford uses a simple color scheme to show us the subject of every national anthem on the planet.

It comes as no surprise that most nations would choose to sing about themselves, but we were surprised by the number of battle-oriented songs in South America, or the fact that apparently Spain’s national anthem has no lyrics. Or Antarctica for that matter.

Immigration

On days like the 4th we also think about what it means to be American. Or a citizen of any country for that matter. That makes it a good time to remember that most of us here are, to some degree, immigrants. And this chart from the NY Times proves it.

What we love about this visualization is how it shows us all of the data from the entire country in one visualization. Look closely and you will see data from literally every county in the nation.

From this overview we get insights that we would not get at the micro level. For example it makes sense that immigrants from the Americas would settle in places that are more like home, in terms of both the northern and southern parts of the country.

But then, if you want, you can just hover your mouse over a particular county and get more details. For example we find it very interesting that there are certain pockets of tightly grouped Asian American immigrants in Texas.

No matter where you live here’s hoping you have a great weekend!

Until next time,

The VisualCrew