Data is Beautiful

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A place to share and discuss visual representations of data: Graphs, charts, maps, etc.

DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information. Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit.

A place to share and discuss visual representations of data: Graphs, charts, maps, etc.

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Originally r/DataisBeautiful

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It's fascinating that while languages vary wildly by speaking speed, information transfer is fairly similar. (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (8 children)

I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually

write the text to be read in English, then translate them into the target languages.
recurit test participants from ~~US~~ western university campuses.

And then there's the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits...

Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it's more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.

First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won't say "probably" in full, you would just say something like "prolly", which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).

And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just.... dumb and ridiculous.

[–] Firoaren 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I take your point without complaint, but I still think you're an alien for saying "prolly"