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They say we are entering the Data Age. There’s certainly enough of the stuff about. Between analytics, public records, and the slow yet steady growth of the Semantic Web, millions of data points are at our fingertips, just waiting to have their stories told.
Telling captivating stories with data is easier said than done. Spreadsheets don’t exactly get hearts singing. Big pieces of JSON don’t inspire so much as they horrify. It doesn’t need to be that way, though. Data can dance. Data should dance.
The site is a testament to the importance of publically available data (this will be a running theme in this article). The numbers are pulled through from the National Digital Forecast Database which is updated hourly. As creators Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg put it, this makes Wind Map a “living portrait” of wind patterns in the contiguous United States.