21 December 2013
Around the end of the year I like to do a seasonal blog post. Last year it was a cheesy Tableau Public Christmas card, this year I've decided to apply some modern data to a very old story, some call it the greatest story every told.
Around the end of the year I like to do a seasonal blog post. Last year it was a cheesy Tableau Public Christmas card, this year I've decided to apply some modern data to a very old story, some call it the greatest story every told.
Old vs New
Comparing that famous birth against modern birthing practice in the USA shows two very different ends of a spectrum. The birth of a child in a stable (assumed, some debate about that) with only its soon to be parents in attendance is a very different story to the medicalised, physician-lead hospital births that happen in 99% of cases across the USA.Another modern addition to this story is of course data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collect information from all birth certificates issued and publish them on their website for download and analysis. It's quite a project to bring them all together however fortunately users of Google Big Query will have noticed a public sample dataset called natality which has been created for us from this data.A discovery in the numbers
While playing around with the natality dataset I discovered an interesting trend regarding birth days (not birthdays) which I'd like to share with you today.Before the viz let me take the opportunity, on behalf of everybody at The Information Lab, to wish you all a wonderful end to 2013 and very happy new year!