#featured silk

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Introducing the Official Ig® Nobel Prizes Database

At Silk we do love science. We like weird and improbable science even more. So it is our distinct pleasure to announce that we have been helping the Annals of Improbable Research put the Ig® Nobel Prizes into a proper online data format. For those who don’t know about the Ig® Nobels, they are annual awards for hilarious but thought-provoking scientific research.

Data from ig-nobel.silk.co

At a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the campus of Harvard University, each year the 10 Ig® Nobels are awarded by actual Nobel Prize winners from years past hand. This is no Stockholm fest. There are no cash prizes. The Ig® Nobel winners fly in at their own expense, from all over the world. But great fun is had by all. The research, too, is very real and often does hold some useful insights for both practical and theoretical purposes. Such as the research into whether the Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese is Affected by Temperature.

As befits the madcap science mantra of the Ig® Nobel awards, their data was organized in, shall we say, a strange formatting system that rendered it difficult to search, filter and share. That’s music to our ears and our crack data journalism team (with Alice Corona on this project) whipped up a fully structured searchable interactive database going back to the inception of the first Ig® Nobel ceremony. We also built some nice visualizations like categories that get the most awards and a visible grouping of award winners by category. (Pro Tip: If you want to embed a copy of the Ig® Nobels on your website, you can easily do so. This works great on WordPress.org and Tumblr blogs, too).

All awards are listed and indexed, as well as a brief description of the research. We have only included the awards through 2013 and will add the 2014 edition after the ceremony on September 18th. In the meantime, we invite you to peruse the Ig® Nobels, find out about improbable research, and enjoy the fruits of our labor. And if you have other suggestions for improbable Silk databases we can build for your organization or any other, do drop us a line on Twitter or via email.

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Transparency, Wikileaks, and Data Journalism

Anyone who has followed Silk knows we have a strong interest in government transparency, civil liberties and corporate responsibility. Yesterday we released the Wikileaks Spy Files Silk. This is the first and only searchable interactive database of the Spy Files.

Data from wikileaks.silk.co

The Spy Files are a trove of 569 leaked documents detailing the activities and practices of companies that sell mass surveillance and communication interception technologies. Wikileaks released three batches of the Spy Files. But you can search them all only in one place - on this Silk, made by Silk data journalist Alice Corona. For example, this query shows you all the technologies that were used to target Facebook users.

Alice found that three companies - Blue Coat, Cobham and Gamma - make up 20% of all the leaked documents. There are many more surprising observations made by Alice on the Wikileaks Silk. The information is well summarized, but you can easily spend an hour or more sifting through the findings and reading the documents (there are download links pointing back to Wikileaks.org included in every page on the Silk). Of course, you can explore and filter all information on the Wikileaks Silk yourself, so you can do your own fact-finding.

All of this brings me to another key point. Generating really interesting content is a big part of our strategy at Silk for several reasons. First, it’s how we show the world the possibilities of Silk and how we engage users. Second, we consistently hear back from heavy Silk users that they got ideas for their own Silks by looking at examples from our gallery. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, creating content is something we actually do for fun to play with and learn about our product.

Original works like the one Alice did take many hours of time. But Silk makes it trivial to convert any spreadsheet into an interactive site with easy to manipulate visualizations. And that allows any Silk user to become a data journalist themselves, even if they are analyzing data from a static table in Wikipedia (such as this Silk which took a table of deaths on Everest and converted it into useful findings about percentages of nationalities killed).

We will continue to pursue original data journalism and you should look for a lot more from Alice and the rest of the Silk team in the near future. And if you have a project in mind, drop us a line on Twitter. We would be happy to help build it.

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Featured Silk: The Tarantino Universe

The Tarantino Universe Silk has extensive information about the 36 movies in which Tarantino was an actor, director, producer or writer. With 1784 pages on characters and 1526 pages on actors, you can create very cool overviews. The home page is full of interesting visualizations, like a grid with movie posters and plot information and a table about budgets and awards, which you can see below.

Use the filter dropdowns to show films where Tarantino was a director, writer, actor or producer. You can click the column headers to sort the information.

Data from tarantino.silk.co

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Featured Silk: Space History

Space History is an interactive database of 300 manned spaceflights, ranging from the first human spaceflight in history (Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961) to the most recent flights to the International Space Station.

You can use the Silk to learn all about the history of man’s adventure’s in space. Every event has a large fact sheet, and you can click on explore to combine variables, add filters and choose the type of graph. You can also start with the visualizations on the home page or the map embedded below.

Map of the landing sites of returning shuttles

Data from space-history.silk.co

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Featured Silk: Shipwrecks

The Shipwrecks Silk contains information on 824 major maritime disasters from Roman times up to 2014. Beautiful images and accurate descriptions and tags make it a very interesting Silk to explore. Below are a few interesting discoveries. We used Kimono Labs to pull in the data and ImportXML in Google Sheets for additional details.

Major maritime disasters before 1700

Data from shipwrecks.silk.co

Major maritime disasters per country

Data from shipwrecks.silk.co

Major maritime disasters with the most victims

Data from shipwrecks.silk.co

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Featured Silk: Tour de France

The Tour de France Silk brings together key data on all teams, riders, stages, sponsors and previous editions of the Tour de France. Explore and analyze away - compare average speeds for all editions for instance:

Data from tour-de-france-2014.silk.co

Or access the data collections and analyses:

Data from tour-de-france-2014.silk.co

And check out this map of stage winners:

Data from tour-de-france-2014.silk.co

This is just the tip of the iceberg, so if you are interested in cycling or sport statistics in general, head over to tour-de-france-2014.silk.co. And keep an eye on the site: Caspar (creator of the Silk) will update it regularly. Send him a message if you have feedback or questions.

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How British Blind Sport uses Silk

British Blind Sport (BBS) is a national charity in the UK aiming to help blind and partially sighted people play sports. Part of their work involves sharing the data they have amassed with sports governing bodies to improve sports opportunities for people with a visual impairment.

The Silk British Blink Sport Cambridgeshire has data and visualizations about the geographic spread of blind and partially sighted people in the Cambridgeshire area, about schools, sport clubs, and other topics. BBS also uses private Silks to collect and explore information on specific regions, schools and sports.

Data from bbs-cambridgeshire.silk.co

Thomas Davies is the Information & Database Coordinator at BBS. We asked him to tell us a bit more about how he uses Silk, and he kindly allowed us to publish this on our blog. Here are our questions and edited excerpts of Thomas’s answers:

What is your goal for using Silk?

> Over the next 3 years, our aim is to share research and data with sporting National Governing Bodies (NGBs) to ensure all their visually impaired (VI) participation programmes are based on solid evidence. As a charity, we are tasked to increase sporting participation amongst visually impaired people. Therefore, it’s important to understand the spread of visually impaired people across the country and focus participation programmes in areas where there is a large number of VI people and a demand for sports opportunities.

How will Silk help you meet these goals?

> Silk allows us to quickly display data on a map. I struggled to find a decent mapping service that was actually user-friendly. Also, we hope to produce different reports for specific NGBs and for specific regions in the UK. I would much rather create a report on Silk instead of producing a printed booklet for NGBs. I want to encourage NGBs to interrogate the data and Silk should allow us to do that. Also, Silk allows us to continually update the information and have NGBs receive subscription digests.

How do you create your Silks?

> We store all of our data in Podio and then generate Excel spreadsheets which I convert into a .CSV file. I can import CSV files easily into Silk. I wouldn’t have the patience to manually add all our data! As I haven’t delved too much into Silk yet, I often use your example projects to learn how I can layout my data in an attractive and effective ways.

On a personal note, at Silk we are proud to help NGOs (like Human Rights Watch) move their data online and visualize that date in beautiful and interesting ways. If you work at an NGO and are reading this, contact us and we can help you build a Silk for your organization to replace paper reports or help your team communicate its message with data (or words, images, video and audio - all work well on Silk). If you have any questions for Thomas or us, please let us know at [email protected]. Cheers!

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Featured Silk: UNESCO World Heritage Sites

In June 2014 UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee announced the new inscriptions for the World Heritage List. This year 26 new sites made it into the list, making the current number of World Heritage Sites 1007, with two sites delisted.

To celebrate this event, we built the UNESCO World Heritage Sites Silk, which anyone can use to quickly visualize facts and stats about UNESCO’s World Heritage database.

The following map shows the new 2014 entries. Visit the Silk to check out an overview of UNESCO Members, a list of sites that didn’t make the cut and much more. All pages have beautiful photo’s too!

Data from unesco-world-heritage.silk.co