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 April 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Social Progress Index | ‘The Social Progress Index offers a rich framework for measuring the multiple dimensions of social progress, benchmarking success, and catalyzing greater human wellbeing.’
Enigma Labs | Nice animated/interactive project showing ‘US Daily Temperature Anomalies 1964-2013’
National Geographic | A range of videographics explaining various matters relating to food around the world
Stanford Kay | Infographic showing the global carbon ‘foot’print. Labelling might be an issue but I like the attempted metaphor.
Twitter | From Brilliant Ads, a very clever ambient/visualisation/ad concept about the consequences of smoking
Washington Post | ‘Where every person lives and works in Manhattan’
Visualizing | Nice curated gallery by Manuel Lima looking at a range of projects that visualise urban patterns
Economist | A new form of interactive static visualisation: representing the odds of being murdered in 5 countries via the chance of a dart hitting the same display. We clearly now must see more dart vis, this needs to be a thing.
Jonathan Hull | Jonathan uses the periodic table framework to good effect, visualising the abundance of elements in the universe, ocean, earth etc.
Washington Post | ‘The depth of the problem’ possibly my first liked tower graphic as it perfectly captures the ludicrous depth of the search for the Malaysian airliner’s black box
Visual Loop | ‘This is Visual Journalism: Special edition dedicated to the awarded infographics at Malofiej 22’
Bloomberg | ‘How Americans Die’ – the latest interactive story from the Bloomberg Visual team
Mapsbynik | Mapping the census blocks where nobody lives in the US
Sensory Maps | Kate launches her latest ‘Smellmap’ – this time for Amsterdam
das Referenz | Typically elegant and briliant work from Raureif to create a free reader app for Wikipedia. Also check out the in-depth design process article link.
The Upshot | ‘A Map of Baseball Nation’ – Facebook fans by zip code.
Fathom | ‘A look at the history of Miles Davis’ career and collaborations according to his (400) recording sessions as documented by the Jazz Discography Project.’
Washington Post | Visual article with some wonderful interactive/animated devices detailing the ‘intensive care’ required for the damaged dome of the US Capitol.
New York Times | ‘How Minorities Have Fared in States With Affirmative Action Bans’
WYNC | ‘Tracking Tickets for Dangerous Driving, by Precinct’
SCMP | Really nice poster quality piece that depicts the biggest players through the history of the Oscars
National Geographic | ‘Nine Cities That Love Their Trees’
Washington Post | ‘Looming: A delayed wallop of pollen’. Nice Gantt-chart style graphic
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
FiveThirtyEight | Interesting exploration of the ongoing exclusion of women in Hollywood, with analysis of the Bechdel test
The Guardian | ‘Why Google Maps gets Africa wrong’
Visual Loop | ’90 dataviz Tumblr blogs to follow: The ultimate list of Tumblr blogs about data visualization, cartography and data journalism’
Smashrun | Smashrun is an “analytical platform for runners” and contains some terrific looking visualisation work. Browse through the blog to see some of the analysis (the link provided here).
The Why Axis | We’ve had a good chunk of articles and discourse about storytelling, Bryan collates them in one place here…
Eager Eyes | …but here are the ones specifically published during April, starting with Robert’s piece ‘Story: a definition’
Neoformix | Here’s Jeff Clark’s piece ‘A Short Reflection on Storytelling in Data Visualization’
The Functional Art | Alberto also wades in with ‘Annotation, narrative, and storytelling in infographics and visualization’
Fell in Love with Data | Enrico might have been having a bad day at work 🙂 – ‘My (stupid) fear we may, one day, become irrelevant’
Telling Information | Nice short summary from Lulu about her take aways from Malofiej 22…
Earth Observatory | …and here’s Rob Simmon’s more in depth write up from his experience as a judge at Malofiej 22
Chartio | An Interview with Scott Murray, Code Artist… D3 Hero and other such monikers
Stanford | Paper from EuroVis 2013: ‘Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization’. Surfacing again now mainly due to…
HBR | This article by Sharon Lin and Jeff Heer: ‘The Right Colours Make Data Easier to Read’
Junk Charts | ‘When to use the start-at-zero rule’
Medium | ‘(Re)defining multimedia journalism: New storytelling forms inspire us’
WonkViz | Less about the subject or analysis, more about the **edit** at the bottom for the importance of misleading interpretations
JND | Article from Don Norman: ‘Predicting too early is as bad as not predicting at all. In making predictions, getting the timing right is as important as getting the idea right.’
Eager Eyes | ‘Review: Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees’
Source | ‘Meet Bloomberg’s dataview: Iterating toward a reusable animated chart flow’
Storytelling With Data | Cole discusses the difference between exploratory and explanatory analysis
nGrain | Really smart demonstration of solutions for ‘looking beyond two dimensions’
Source | ‘Introducing Fourscore: Speedy sentiment-grid making from WNYC + Al Jazeera America’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Graphitti | Detailed process narrative about Tom MacInnes attempts at ‘his’ first interactive map.
Dashing 3js | Comprehensive set of tutorials and screencasts to help you learn how to make data visualisations with D3.js
The Information Lab | Quick tutorial for ‘Advanced Map Visualisation in Tableau using Alteryx’
Dataplusscience | The first Sankey diagram I’ve seen attempted in Tableau, with a set of notes explaining how it was done
Scribd | Golan Levin’s presentation from Malofiej 22 – ‘Information Arts, Critical Making’
Stat Hunting | A very good, honest and constructive reflection from Steve Fenn about his experiences of taking and responding to (quite brutal) criticism of one of his pieces of work.
Data Remixed | ‘Dimension Line Charts: a (slight) variation on arrow charts’ – nice article from Ben Jones about the issue of (mis)interpreting arrowheads
Lena Groeger | Slides from Lena terrific talk at OpenVis 2014 about the ‘wee things’ in visualisation design
FastCo Labs | ‘The Five Best Libraries For Building Data Visualizations’ with contributions from Moritz Stefaner, Mr D3 Hero, Jan Willem Tulp, Benjamin Wiederkehr and Erik Cunningham
Vimeo | Think I might have shared before but worth another go if so, ‘Webstock ’13: Mike Monteiro – How Designers Destroyed the World’
Peltier Tech Blog | Nice excel tutorial from Jon for ‘Axis Labels That Don’t Block Plotted Data’
PJIM | Always a good read: Volume VI, Issue 2 of the ‘Parson Journal for Information Mapping’
The Why Axis | ‘Today we have better access to health information than ever before but this means little without greater understanding. Visualizing Health is a weapon in the fight to create a culture of health.’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Mapbox | Launching Mapbox outdoors – ‘A beautiful new map designed for outdoor adventures.’
Density Design | Updated version of RAW
Visci | Newly discovered site, the impressive ‘Visual Science’: – “a media production service, providing graphical and animation solutions to the industrial, academic and educational sectors” – check out the showreel
TargetProcess | Newly discovered tool for Visual Management: ‘Software to plan and track any process, including Scrum, Kanban and your own.’
Amazon | New book: ‘The Best American Infographics 2014’ edited by Gareth Cook (Disclaimer: I was a member of the ‘brains trust’)
Information is Beautiful Awards | Revealing the winners of the ‘Human Cost’ visualisation challenge
Software Studies Initiative | Congratulations to Lev Manovich and his team for securing one of the very rare Twitter Data grants, here’s the abstract for their proposed work
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
BBC News | ‘Bristol artist creates hand-drawn maps of the city’
FastCo Design | ‘A Top Nike Designer Rebrands Game Of Thrones’
Offbeat | Unusual data source but might interest one or two ‘World Football Statue Database’
YouTube | Archive of the great Numberphile videos – ‘videos about numbers’
Vox | ‘Amtrak’s insane train boarding rules, explained’
Washington Post | Oh dear, America, looks like you’ve been taking the dart from above into your ‘guessing where Ukraine is’
The Guardian | ‘What would football managers see if they wore Google Glass?’
Emily Garfield Art | ‘Emily Garfield creates intricate maps of imaginary places that explore the origins of cities and the function of maps themselves.’
Interface Vision | A HUGE collection of examples/images of Visual Programming Languages