Skip to content
Atlas desk

WORLD HERITAGE SITES: The Artometrics of World Heritage Sites

This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2024-02-06 release on World Heritage Sites — 6 rows after cleaning and merge.

Artometrics Editorial5 min read
Share this article
WORLD HERITAGE SITES: The Artometrics of World Heritage Sites
This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2024-02-06 release on World Heritage Sites — 6 rows after cleaning and merge.

This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2024-02-06 release on World Heritage Sites6 rows after cleaning and merge. How did UNESCO site counts grow across Scandinavia between 2004 and 2022?

Five charts track Value across time, category, and named entities — trend, leaders, distribution, tiers, and relationships. Where companion files exist in the repo, they are joined before analysis so reception, geography, or metadata columns are not left on the table.

FAST FACTS

6Records in the working dataset
9.00Median Value
15.0Highest observed Value
SwedenTop Country by Value
2004–2022Year span covered in the file

DATASET CONTEXT

The source is the TidyTuesday release from 2024-02-06 (R for Data Science community). This working file contains 6 rows and 3 columns after merging all available CSV/XLSX tables in the week folder.

Charts are exported as Plotly JSON with PNG fallbacks. Medians are used for robustness where distributions skew. Index-style fields (row numbers, sequential IDs) are excluded from metric selection.

How to read this report: start with the chart caption, then ask what the metric actually means, what a non-expert should notice first, and what an expert would challenge in the source. The goal is not to memorize every number; it is to leave with a sharper question than the one you arrived with.

Reader path: if you are new to the topic, treat each chart as a guided tour of one question: who leads, how concentrated the field is, what changes over time, and where the outliers sit. If you already know the domain, use the same charts as a challenge: check whether the metric is the right proxy, whether the source omits an important population, and whether the headline survives the limitations section.

CHART 1 — TREND

Median Value Over Time

Median value is rising from 5.00 in the opening period to 10.0 at the close.

Annual medians filter one-off spikes so the structural slope — not viral outliers — drives the story.

CHART 2 — LEADERS

Sweden leads at 14.0 — 7.00 marks the median among the top dozen

Sweden leads at 14.07.00 marks the median among the top dozen.

Head-of-field concentration is where quality, scale, or brand visibly separates from the pack.

Top Country Over Time

The leading names do not move in lockstep — some fade as others surge.

Tracking medians over time separates sustained dominance from one-off spikes.

CHART 4 — YEAR COMPARE

Value by year and Country

Grouped bars expose who gained between 2004 and 2022 — not just the latest leaderboard.

Small panels reward side-by-side reading; totals hide per-entity momentum.

CHART 5 — GROWTH

Value growth by Country

Denmark posted the largest gain (150%) from 2004 to 2022.

Percent-change bars normalize different starting points — essential when baselines differ.

LIMITATIONS

Community-cleaned TidyTuesday snapshots are not live APIs. Missing values, spelling variants, and week-of-export coverage limits apply. Merged tables may fan out or duplicate rows when join keys are imperfect.

Findings describe the file on hand — treat them as structural signals about World Heritage Sites, not exhaustive truth about the full domain.

CONCLUSION

Read as a teaching map, World Heritage Sites shows why one metric is rarely enough: leaders, tails, trends, and relationships each answer a different question about value.

The best reading is modest: use the chart to sharpen the question, then check the source and limits before turning it into a claim.

REFERENCES

Data Science Learning Community. (2024). TidyTuesday: World Heritage Sites. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2024/2024-02-06/heritage.csv

EDITOR'S NOTE

Artometrics data report from the TidyTuesday research pipeline. Charts and aggregates are reproducible from the embedded exhibits and public source files.

View TidyTuesday source on GitHub