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 December 2013.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Tableau | [Warning, the first of many ‘years in review’ posts. if you hate those type of things, in which case, why are you on here?] Tableau Public’s 2013 year in review, curated by Ben Jones
Washington Post | ‘2013: The year in graphics’
New York Times | ‘2013: The Year in Interactive Storytelling’
The Telegraph | ‘A galaxy? A supernova? No, it’s NASA’s website’
BBC News | ‘2013: A year in graphics’
Brain Pickings | ‘Britain vs. America in Minimalist Vintage Infographics’
Flowing Data | ‘Data and visualization year in review, 2013’
Post Graphics | Striking visualisation that maximises the personalisation of the data – the 91 children killed in the US during 2012
EyeSeeData | Animated and interactive visualisation of the history of the FIFA World Cup
Brain Pickings | ‘Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized’
bdon | We saw sever similar projects during 2013, now here’s one for the building ages of NYC and its five boroughs
Creative-co | Interactive Harry Potter novel search tool for locating keywords of phrases and their mention
Bloomberg | Interactive story exporing ‘how we spend’
Pew Research | Chart of the Week: Coffee and tea around the world
Simon Rogers | ‘Goodbye #NelsonMandela: visualising the response’
Visualizing.org | ‘How the money flows in the 50 most expensive football transfers’
New York Times | The most visited page on the New York Times during 2013. Create your own dialect map – ‘How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk’
IEA | A huge project to create interactive Sankey diagrams for (seemingly) ever world nation showing their energy consumption by type, sector and usage.
Grahaphics | Motion graphic looking at ‘Income inequality in NYC’
Knight Foundation | ‘What does the civic tech landscape look like?’
Vimeo | ‘Midday Traffic Time Collapsed and Reorganized by Color: San Diego Study #3’
Fathom | Launching the updated ‘Millennium Development Goals project’
MoMA | Interactive network tool to explore the connections between exhibitors included in the ‘Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925’ season at MoMA
WSJ | ‘Hollowing out a City: Detroit has watched its population contract over decades as residents have fled for the suburbs’
Fathom | Breaking down the six Rocky films, Rocky Morphology ‘analyzes the Rocky series in order to identify its key narrative elements.’
NYC Henge | Showing the best location around NYC to experience the ‘Manhattanhenge’ this visualisation ‘helps you explore and learn about the phenomenon and maybe see the NYC street grids in a whole new light’.
Rosny | (It is in French so I’m going to have to guess) Similar approach to Moritz Stefaner’s Stadtbilder project, this project maps the prevalence of different ‘lifestyle’ options around Rosny-sous-Bois (shops, bars, restaurants etc.)
FastCo Create | ‘See the 25 most beautiful data visualisations of 2013’
ESPN | ‘SPI World Cup group stage projections’
New York Times | ‘State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year Since Newtown’
Twitter | (Image of the above graphic in the print version)
Visual Loop | ‘Our 100 favorite interactive visualizations of the year’
Reuters | ‘Shark attacks since 1990’ (published on Twitter)
FastCo Design | ‘The 21 Best Infographics Of 2013’
Huffington Post | Book visualisations: Short animation to explain difficult ideas from the book ‘The Attacking Ocean’
Scientific American | Interactive visualisation: ‘The flavour connection’
Post Graphics | Infographic: ‘The most contested real estate on Earth?’
FlowingData | ‘The most unisex names in US history’
Visual.ly | ‘The Top 20 Interactive Visualizations of 2013’
Shoothill | ‘This gigantic image shows all the digits of the world’s largest known prime number.’
AnimatedData | ‘UK Temperature History: Explore the temperature in the United Kingdom since 1910’
USA Today | Longform digital story of ‘Behind the Bloodshed: The Untold Story of America’s Mass Killings’
Articles
The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse, interviews and videos
Thomas Levine | Super in depth materials to support/accompany Thomas’ talk at NYC Open Data
Sheila Pontis | Sheila was on fire in December! This piece describes ’38 Steps for Effective Information Design’
MapLab | ‘6 Reasons to Get Over Your Fear of Coding and Start Making Better Maps’
Eager Eyes | ‘A Lack of Communication and Visibility’ – Robert makes a please for new and improved visualisation web-resources to track the field (good comments/discussion too)
BBC Academy | ‘Data journalism: What’s new, what’s not, and work in progress’
BBC News | ‘Why border lines drawn with a ruler in WW1 still rock the Middle East’
Inspire | Nice video interview with Kim Rees and Dino Citraro of Periscopic
Null School | Enchanting visualisation of the flow of wind across the Earth
Visual.ly | ‘How Do Our Brains Process Infographics? MIT “Mongrel” Shows Peripheral Vision at Work’
Yolandama | ‘Infographics booming in China’
O’Reilly Data | ‘Interactive Visualization of Big Data’ by Jeff Heer
Nextness | ‘John Maeda: an artist redesigns leadership’
The Information | ‘Letter from the editor: Hello World’
Patrick Garvin | A discussion about the issue of infographics and memorability
Twitter | Beginning a flurry of related articles discussing the use of axis scaling in a Reuters graphic
The Functional Art | Here’s Alberto’s take (and links to others still)
Voilà | Here’s Francis Gagnon’s take
Junk Charts | Here’s Kaiser Fung’s take
Eager Eyes | And finally, for now, Robert picks up the baton
Sheila Pontis | ‘Sensemaking Activities in Information Design’
Twitter | ‘Interesting piece on why #charts in The Economist are the way they are’
Substratum | New issues in the series of inspirational interviews
Skillshare | ‘Meet Graham Roberts, a Graphics/Multimedia Editor at The New York Times who teaches an Animated Information Graphics class.’
Peachpit | ‘The Many-Faced Infographic: Brooklyn, Elephants, and the Visualization of Data’
Medium | ‘The Tufte totem in information designland: Edward Rolf Tufte preceeded the digital age’
O’Reilly Radar | ‘Tweets loud and quiet: Twitter’s long, long, long tail suggests the service is less democratic than it seems.’
Guardian | ‘Unreliable statistics of 2013’
Perceptual Edge | Stephen rallies at the ‘Scourge of Unnecessary Complexity’
Sheila Pontis | Final entry for Sheila, ‘Visualisations & the Process of Abstraction’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Booz Allen | ‘The Field Guide to Data Science’
Drawing With Numbers | ‘Creating data, multi-step recurrence relations, fractals and 3D imaging… without leaving Tableau’
Bloomberg | Another reminder of the excellent data sources available on Bloomberg’s visual data site
Stanford | Paper: ‘Interpretation and Trust: Designing Model-Driven Visualizations for Text Analysis’
Patrick Garvin | Project design narrative: ‘How BostonGlobe.com’s gay marriage interactive graphic came to be’
Data Remixed | Ben takes on my observations about my love for slope graphs with a demo (and tutorial) for doing the same in Tableau
The Why Axis | ‘DataViva, Built in Brazil, Available to All’
Wiley | Companion site to the book ‘Visual Data Mining: Techniques and Tools for Data Visualization and Mining’ listing some of the digital resources mentioned, including ‘Data Visualization and Data Mining Success Stories’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Guardian | Important market report about the growth in take up of tablets vs. PC’s – these are the platforms on which we will be consuming more of our visualisation work
British Library | ‘Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight’ – profiling the events taking place in under the libraries’ special season (including some almost sold out data visualisation workshops offered by yours truly)
Information Architects | Outlining the functions of Writer Pro
Future Everything | This year’s conference taking place in Manchester on 31st March and 1st April, tickets now on sale
Data Stories | Newly discovered site, ‘Data Stories… on India, one chart at a time’, does what it says on the tin!
Data Portraits | Connected to the NASA website story above… Data Portraits offers ‘bespoke art visualising your web presence’
Knight Lab | ‘Introducing the StoryMapJS Beta, now with an authoring tool’
Fathom | ‘The Weather’ – A post from (former) intern Tim Ripper who shares his experiences with one of the projects he worked on at Fathom.
Sundries
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
Visual News | ‘How To Escalator: A Smart Traffic Control Proposition for the Busy London Underground’ – but good counterpoint made on Twitter about yellow markings also used for where not to stand…
YouTube | Sid the Science Kid – “I love charts” (PBS Kids)
Anitype | ‘Anitype invites you to animate letters with JavaScript, so we can begin to see what an animated typeface might look like on the web.’
GifPop | Rachel Binx and Sha Hwang’s new venture, building on their passion for all things gif! – ‘Gifpop is a tool to make custom cards from animated gifs, using the magic of lenticular printing.’
FastCo Create | ‘Domino’s responds to British Airways “look up” billboard with its own cheeky version’
Digital Synopsis | ‘How Virgin America Got 6 Million People To Watch A Flight Safety Video Without Stepping On A Plane’
Printalloverme | ‘Choose your object, upload your print, buy and sell your product’
Twitter | ‘One of the oldest known photographs of a man smiling’ – no good visualisation-related reason, just liked it! (and it looks like Roger Moore)
NASA | ‘Urban growth, Philippines’
Business Insider | ‘The British Library Is Putting Millions Of Amazing Images On Flickr That Probably Would Have Been Lost In Time’
FastCo Design | ‘Trippy Clocks That Challenge Your Perception Of Time’