Can Data Analysis be Fun?

Can data analysis actually be fun? Certainly there are some data geeks who enjoy analyzing data, but for most people this sounds like a dull task. How can we add some fun to data analysis?

The data being analyzed can make a huge difference if it is fun or not. "Edward Tufte said in his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, "If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers." Any analysis performed on data will not be interesting unless the data itself is interesting. Of course what data is interesting depends on who the audience is. The New York Times is good at showing the general public data that most people can relate to as shown in "How Different Groups Spend Their Day" and "The Jobless Rate for People Like You".

Can we turn Data Analytics into a game? Luis Von Ahn who invented Captcha, has created games out of extraordinarily mundane tasks on his website GWAP. For example in the ESP game, two people see an image on the screen. They type names for what they see until they both type in the same word. They have 2 and a half minutes to label 15 images. The winning labels for the images are then used to train search engines to find images. Users get points for playing the various games and a sizeable community has built up around these games.


I've heard it said that to add fun to an app, just make it collaborative or competitive. Many popular games on Facebook such as Farmville encourage collaboration in a way that is viral. MMORPG games like World of Warcraft are built around these principles. Martin Wattenberg the creator of NameVoyager for visualizing baby names found some surprising results of releasing his visualization on the internet. In studying comments about the NameVoyager posted on various blogs, he found that people behaved in a collaborative/competitive manor similar to how they would in a game such as World of Warcraft. He also found that even people who weren't interested in babies or baby names really enjoyed being able to interact with the data. IBM has taken this idea further with the Many Eyes website a thriving community for people to upload and visualize data and make comments on the visualizations. By making the data more social, it becomes more fun.