How Different Groups Spend Their Day – The New York Times

This is one of my favorite information visualization pieces.  It’s created from data compiled by the American Time Use Survey and plots graphs to show the proportion of Americans engaging in specific activities for every hour of the day.  Using the tool, one can get a very precise picture of what an average person is doing at any moment of any day.  More fascinating is the ability to slice this data demographically to see the difference between how teenages and senoirs spend their days, or how men and women differ in their daily schedules.  It enables the viewer to get a much larger sense of the data than just what is presented on the screen.  With any data visualization task this large, the greatest challenge remains how to display information in ways that make sense and convey meaning.  I think that this graph accomplishes this well.