Culture, Design, General, etc.

Amazing Mad Men smoking/drinking data visualisations

The visual.ly website is a great place to watch for infographics and data visualisations of all sorts*, and a recent one, brought to my attention by excellent publication Fast Company, is particularly boggling.

Credit: http://visual.ly/mad-drinkers. Click to enlarge.

In the words of its creators, it’s

Analysis of characters’ bad behaviours in the TV Series Mad Men during the first season of the show. Developed during the Workshop Culture Data Culture held by Santiago Ortiz Herrera at Politecnico di Milano.

There are 6 charts in all:

  1. total amount of single drinks (per person and episode)
  2. total amount of beverage drunk and relative amount of alcohol (per person and episode)
  3. kinds of drinks and relative occurrence (per drink and episode) - whisky is the major favourite here although, I have to say, from memory it wasn’t terribly _good_ whisky
  4. drink recipes/constituents and nationalities (well, the nationalities of the liquids contained therein)
  5. total amount of tobacco smoked (per person and episode)
  6. drinking relations between members

Not surprisingly, our man Don Draper is a leader in the stats.  Interestingly, though, is the ladies - one sees Peggy start to feature more in the ‘bad behaviour’ as she is accepted by the lads, and starts to do more than be a gopher.  Also, the final visualisation is quite interesting - episodes 7 and 8 are the first time we see two of the main ladies, Peggy and Joan, drink in more social settings.

You can see all 6 of the visualisations, and more information, here.

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* Also, you can use it to generate automatic reports, which can be useful/fun for people AND companies!