Best of the visualisation web… September 2013

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from September 2013.

Visualisations/Infographics

Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.

Neoformix | Visualising Toronto’s 311 service calls

Guardian | Holy infographics: the bible visualised

OpenDataSites | A visualisation/tool by Ben Jones to present the world’s Open Data sites, currently numbered at 50 countries, 299 sites.

Listen | Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site, punctuated by a string swell. You can welcome him or her by clicking the blue banner and adding a note on their talk page.

ChartBall | Baseball Radial Charts: A Visual Comparison of Batters

Waag | There’s been quite a few of these lately, visualisations that map the age of buildings in cities, here’s one for the entire span of the Netherlands

Maps.Grammata | Portfolio of work from the great Matthew Bloch of the New York Times

New York Times | …and here’s a project Matthew worked on: ‘Tracking the Mayoral Candidates across New York City’

Washington Post | Graphic breakdown of Robert Griffin III’s 152 hits

BBC | ‘Zaatari refugee camp: Rebuilding lives in the desert’

Atlantic Cities | ‘There Are a Lot of Ways to Visualize Stop-and-Frisk. This One Is the Best’

Visual Metaphors | Divided London, visualising the racial divides in London

Neoformix | Similar interrogation here from Jeff Clark looking at Toronto’s Visible Minorities

Endgadget | ‘There are only so many ways one can juice up boring Excel data, but Microsoft’s new Power Map Preview for Office 365 looks like it’s up to the challenge’. Uh oh.

NASA ESW | ‘NASA satellites have been mapping Earth for over 40 years. These global observations of the atmosphere, biosphere, land surface, solid Earth, and ocean enable an improved understanding of the Earth as an integrated system. These images feature data from over a dozen Earth observation missions.’

Youth Development Index | ‘The Commonwealth Youth Development Index (YDI) measures the status of 15-29 year-olds in 170 countries according to five key domains: Education, Health and Well-being, Employment, Civic Participation and Political Participation.’

Into the Okavango | ‘A Live-data Expedition into the Okavango Delta’

Peltier Tech | Charting Survey results

Flowing Data | Dialect quiz shows where others talk like you do

Slate | ‘Is It Possible To Fit the Civil War Into a Single Chart? Here’s One Beautiful Attempt’

Wait But Why | Putting Time In Perspective

Miska Knapek | Some really interesting projects in Miska’s portfolio

Washington Post | How D.C. could look if the height restriction changes

New York Times | Front Row to Fashion Week

Spatially | ‘Population Lines’ works now available in print

bdon | Visualizing transit delays in real time: MUNI Light Rail

Ravi | ‘Living United States Presidents’

Articles

The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse and interviews

Vis4.net | Mastering Multi-huedColor Scales with Chroma.js

Worry Dream | A frame-by-frame articled (new verb, you’re welcome) version of Bret Victor’s talk ‘Media for Thinking the Unthinkable: Designing a new medium for science and engineering”

Consumerist | ‘Data Broker Acxiom’s New Site Allows Users To View And Edit The Marketing Info It’s Collected’

Peltier Tech | Using colours in Excel

Wired | Loads of colour-related articles going out right now, 95% of them with Rob Simmon’s name associated with them 🙂 – here’s one that discusses the colour choices around the depicting of the Yosemite Rim Fire

The Functional Art | An imaginary dialogue about infographics between a designer and a managing editor

JMP Blog | Celebrating Statisticians: John W. Tukey

TechCrunch | ‘The Data Visualization Technology That Makes The America’s Cup Accessible To The Rest Of Us’

Tableau | A Theory of Discovery: Tableau Customer Conference 2013 Keynote

HBR | Visualizing Trouble

New York Times | ‘The World as They Knew It: The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking’

Tableau | Tableau 8.1: Sophisticated Analytics for Sophisticated People

Use This | Interview with Santiago Ortiz, Developer, Visualiser

HBR | ‘The Importance of Spatial Thinking Now’

qunb | Why We Hate Infographics (And Why You Should)

Data Animator | Great article about thinking around the task of analysis, structured around one of my favourite quotes, ‘the known knowns’

The Why Axis | Bryan explores the Washington Post’s ‘Behind the Black Budget’ project via an interview with one of its creators, Wilson Andrews

Well Formed Data | Moritz outlines the work behind his great project ‘Mapping Electionland’

TED Talks | Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley: Mapping ideas worth spreading

YouTube | Author Reif Larsen at the Dutch Infographic Conference #IC13nl about infographics and his spike of excitement while working on his novel ‘The Selective Works of T.S. Spivet’, termed his ‘infogasm’

Excel Charts | Jorge as provocative as ever 🙂 with this piece ‘Why I Don’t Like Bar Charts’

Tow Center | Storytelling with Data Visualization: Context is King

Dominikus | How touch visualizations turn us into lean-back analysts

Visually | CNN Tells Stories With Data, in Six-Second Vine Videos

Charts N Things | 19 Sketches of Quarterback Timelines

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Wolfram | Stephen Worlfram takes on the thorny issue of gauges in this profile of Mathematica’s built-in visualisation options. Will it change opinions? Possibly not.

PostGraphics | Behind the scenes: The perils at Great Falls

VizWorld | Visualizing for the Color Blind

Vis4.net | Bit of a masterclass in analysing data from Gregor, here he explores bias in Opinion polls using R

Scoop.It | Collection of resources aimed at helping journalists learn R

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.

Amazon | New Book: “Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think”, By Stephen Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller

Editorially | New tool: ‘Editorially: makes collaborative writing easy’

Apptitude | New agency: apptitude is a design-centered software agency based in Lausanne, Switzerland, aspiring to increase its expertise and recognition in the fields of data visualization, healthcare and environmental software.

Gareth Cook | New Book: The Best American Infographics 2013

QGIS | I believe this is an updated version 2.0 of the free, open source GIS tool

INST-INT | Conference, 15/16 November, Minneapolis – ‘A gathering focused on sharing insights + experiences from the field of interactive installation. Welcome to this inst-int’

Eco West | A new site to me, ‘Visualizing Environmental Trends’. “We analyze, visualize, and share data on environmental trends in the North American West. All of our downloads and resources are free.”

Aligned Left | Where to Post and Find Data Visualization Jobs

Amazon | New Book: “Designing News: Changing the World of Editorial Design and Information Graphics”, by Francesco Franchi

Random and miscellaneous

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data/technology focus or just seem worthy of sharing

Guardian | Rise of the new geeks: how the outsiders won

New York Times | ‘The High School Challenge’ – take the maths challenge

Guardian | Why I love… movie computers

Core77 | Tracking the rapid iteration and development of the new Yahoo! logo

Max Degtyarev | Kind of a small multiples/time line but just a nice, fun graphic about the day in the life of a bench

Spoon & Tango | Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist

Bobbby Genalo | ‘Datacoasters are wooden toys that reappropriate the classic waiting room “Rollercoaster,” a colorful, kinetic toy that has enraptured millions of youths waiting their turn at the doctor’s office.’

YouTube | ‘3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo’