This article was published on April 4, 2016

MIT’s new visualization tool is a goldmine for data nerds


MIT’s new visualization tool is a goldmine for data nerds Image by: MIT

Love impressing your pals with all there is to know about computer science? Or perhaps state geography is more your thing?

MIT Media Lab, in partnership with Deloitte and the data visualization startup Datawheel, has just gone live with perhaps the most extensive tool ever created for mining and visualizing US government open data, called Data USA.

Type in ‘Texas’ and you’ll get everything from population size (27 million, #2 country-wide) to demographics, which all make for impressive visualization.

Where do people in Texas work?

Where people in Texas work
Credit: Data USA
How about the places in Texas with the most obese people?

Screen-Shot-2016-04-04-at-14.21.53
Credit: Data USA

The platform combines datasets from things like the US census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics to reveal large-scale trends about the United States population.

The team behind it is already starting to tell stories using the data they’ve curated, including the fact that men still dominate in the highest paid industries or the close connection between diabetes and obesity.

The tools might change, but it seems some things are harder to budge.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.