Best of the visualisation web… January 2014

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 January 2014.

Visualisations/Infographics

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

WFP | Interactive globe from Santiago Ortiz displaying the country-by-country stories of donors and recipients involved in the World Food Programme (WFP)

The Refugee Project | “The Refugee Project is an interactive map of refugee migrations around the world in each year since 1975.”

Jehiah | Jehiah 13: An interactive personal report

Twitter | Interactive and animated map shows the range and volume of different terms surrounding the “tweeting happy new year around the world”

Tableau Public | Counting down the top 5 Tableau Public visualisations of 2013

FastCo Design | ‘A Reggae Song That Explains The 2013 Stock Market’. Really.

FastCoExist | ‘A Stunning Visualization Of Every Popular Protest Since 1979’

ConcertHotels | ‘From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years of Rock in less than a minute’

BBC | ‘The seats which could decide the next election’

The Washington Post | ’40 more maps that explain the world’

Mapbox | ‘A woodcut inspired map for city streets’

Bloomberg | ‘Tracking super bowl ticket prices’ (Nice use of connected scatter plot)

Mashable | ‘These 10 Real-Time Visualizations Put the World in Perspective’

Guardian | ‘Burglaries in Australia: by the numbers’

Washington Post | ‘What’s in that image? Masterpieces like you’ve never seen them before’

Apple | ‘Celebrating 30 years since the introduction of the Macintosh’

Boston Globe | ‘A taxonomy of movie psychos: Psychiatrist Samuel Leistedt sorts the diagnosable cases from the villains of pure fantasy’

Washington Post | ‘History through the president’s words’

FlowingData | ‘Famous Movie Quotes’ poster: “The most memorable movie quotes selected by the American Film Institute, represented with charts”

PeopleViz | ‘Where are the Big Polluters since 1971?’

Twitter | Interactive streamgraph that breaks down the speech and reaction to the State of The Union address minute by minute on Twitter

New York Times | Animated/interactive small multiples profiling ‘A Stark Gap in Breast Cancer Deaths’

SCMP | Jane Pong and Cedric Sam look at the Australian Open 2014 ‘Road to victory’: “look at the paths of the top eight players in the tournament and the minutes they spent on the court”

NZZ | A visual portrait of snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov

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

Wired | ‘Study: body mapping reveals emotions are felt in the same way across cultures’

Computing Now | ‘A snapshot of current trends in visualisation’

FastCo Design | ‘The 17 Most Amazing User Interfaces Of The Year’

New York Times | ‘Makeover for maps’: Interview with Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck about how he is “trying to rethink how data is presented”.

Tow Center | ‘Making Data More Familiar with Concrete Scales’

FILWD | ‘The myth of the aimless data explorer’

Scientific American | Jen Christiansen describes how she “reconciled my love for art and science”

HBR | Kate Crawford discusses the ‘hidden biases in big data’

Slate | ‘Basketball, Football, and Hockey Are All the Same Game: What big data can teach us about our favorite sports’

Microsoft Research | ‘A Survey on Information Visualization: Recent Advances and Challenges’

Arxiv | Michael Friendly presents the ‘Golden Age of Statistical Graphics’, framing developments between 1850 and 1900 (ish)

Tableau | Jewel Loree tells everyone: ‘Why I blog and you should too’

EagerEyes | Robert’s annual ‘The State of Information Visualization’ for 2014

Futurearth | ‘Data visualization for science: the next frontier?’

EagerEyes | Robert starts off a five-part series on peer review in visualisation with a takedown of the much-discussed ‘quiltplot’

Simply Statistics | A response to the hate aimed at the quiltplot

FILWD | Enrico on ‘The Role of Algorithms in Data Visualization’

If We Assume | Discussing findings from an exploration into the ‘Readability of Tweets and their Geographic Correlation with Education’

VizNinja | Paul’s latest ‘2 minutes with…’ interview series, this with Kelly Martin of VizCandy

Michael Babwahsingh | Michael makes an appeal for a change in the conversation – “spending less time curating conversations and more time getting hands dirty in sensemaking” (paraphrasing)

Perceptual Edge | Bryan steps in for Stephen and discusses a redesign of one of Bill Gates’ favourite graphs

PJIM | ‘Visual Storytelling at the Graphics Department of The New York Times, by Sergio Pecanha’

Medium | ‘What The Longform Backlash Is All About: Taking the best of the magazine craft online. And leaving the rest on paper’

Learning & Development

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

Source | Behind the scenes design narrative of the New York Times digital re-design

Juice Analytics | ‘Reading Visualizations for Beginners’

Data to Display | ‘Communicating changes in rank over time: bumps charts and slopegraphs’

Policy Viz | ‘To Slope Chart or Not to Slope Chart?’

Nature Graphics | Dissecting the design challenge of presenting one million deaths on two pages

Junk Charts | Discussing ‘Losing the big picture’ – “you should focus less on comprehensiveness and focus more on highlighting the good data”

Richard Bedford | A case study to demonstrate using GIS for the uncovering of stories in data

Kutosis | ‘Tables, charts, paragraphs and narratives: We need to be both Type-A analysts and Type-B analysts’

Peter Smart | ‘It’s time to… Rethink the airline boarding pass’

Flowing Data | Need help to get your head around mapping projections… ‘Map projections illustrated with a face’

Knight Lab | ‘Behind the dialect map interactive: How an intern created The New York Times’ most popular piece of content in 2013’

Work Made for Hire | ‘How to Tell A Client How Much Something Costs’

Design Notes | Discussing the design process for working with Dataminr

School of Data | ‘Tutorial: Data Visualisation for Print’

Sociable Physics | ‘Data visualisation programming: a recap’

DataVizCatalogue | ‘The Data Visualisation Catalogue: Helping you display your data…’

Subject News

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

Visual Complexity | New Book: “The Book of Trees”, by Manuel Lima, available for pre-order

Graphical Web | ‘Call for Participation’ open for 3rd edition of the Graphical Web Conference

Amiando | Tickets now on sale for the Information Design Conference 2014, 7-8 April

VUDlab | ‘The Visualizing Urban Data Idealab (VUDlab) is a student-led organization formed at University of California-Berkeley’ with a mission ‘to yield research insights and assist decision-makers who confront the problems facing modern cities.’

VB News | ‘Chartio grabs $2.2M for simple but powerful data visualization’

UK Data Service | Newly discovered site: “The UK Data Service is a comprehensive resource funded by the ESRC to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data.”

Knight Foundation | Profiling the 24 projects that will receive new funding from the Knight Foundation

Google | ‘New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline’

Guardian | ‘UK government plans switch from Microsoft Office to open source’

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

Designboom | Article profiling a visit to BIG architects new lofted/industrial studio in the district of valby, in the southwestern area of Copenhagen. Always interesting to peer behind the curtain at studios like this!

The Atlantic | ‘How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood’

Twitter | Graphically revealing how Luis Suarez posed questions for the Hull defence…

Creative Review | Breaking down the thinking behind the new logo for ‘Made in Britain’

BBC News | ‘The map that saved the London Underground’

Transom | Profiling Jonathan Harris’ manifesto titled ‘Navigating Stuckness’ described as ‘an autobiographical journey with teachable moments, following Jonathan’s path as a diarist, painter, storyteller, data artist, web visionary, etc’

BBC | ‘Presenting a warm front: 60 years of the British TV weather forecast’

See Your Folks | Calculating how many more times you will see your parents based on current visiting patterns.

EagerPies | ‘Pie in the Sky: The Dream of Big Data’

Twitter | ‘Guideline-poster for the illustrators of The Simpsons’

Wimp | ‘News report from 1981 about the Internet’

Twitter | 3D popup dataviz

FastCo Design | ‘Why Visa is Sick of Gold’

Slate | ‘Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.’