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 March 2015.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
FastCo Design | ‘This Eerie Virtual Flood Will Scare You Into Giving A Damn About Climate Change’
You Are Here | Estimating the ‘sum of the building-volume in the city of San Francisco stacked as floors’
BBC World Service | ‘A Visual Guide: Understanding Ebola’ video of Hans Rosling explaining how the disease started
The Creators Project | ‘Hear a Chaotic Orchestra Made from Brainwaves’
National Geographic | Beautiful animated work exploring the size, anatomy, behaviour and threats to the blue whale
Morphocode | A lovely collection of examples of everyone’s favourite, small multiples
Species in Pieces | ’30 Species. 30 Pieces. 1 fragmented survival. A CSS-based interactive exhibition celebrating evolutionary distinction.’
JMP Blog | Xan Gregg uses JMP to explore some alternative approaches to visualising the recent measles incidence heatmap from the WSJ
Washington Post | ‘Visualizing the 220,000 lives lost in Syria’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?’
Visual Cinnamon | ‘A Bubble chart about Food Poisoning’
Behance | A visualisation of global migration for Wired Italia
Stefanie Posavec | Stef’s collaboration with Miriam Quick ‘Air Transformed’ which asks ‘What if we could really see and feel the burden that air pollution places on our bodies?’
Bloomberg | Pizza charts. Says it all.
Beautiful Maps | A collection of beautiful cartogrpahy curated by Dennys Hess
Ri.id | ‘Close the Gap’ – a bonanza of small multiple goodness from Ri Liu looking at the gaps between women and men in Labour force participation around the world
The Economist | Interesting stacked bar/connected timeline technique showing the ‘the evolution of Israeli politics’
New York Times | Detailed visual profile of ‘Syria After Four Years of Mayhem’
Animated Data | Really smart (updated) interactive formula 1 Timeline from Peter Cook
Washington Post | ‘Charted: The life and death of every major Walking Dead character’
Rainscapes | Beautiful animated work looking at rainfall patterns across America’s west coast states
Washington Post | A superb reverse-scroll scaled journey up the summit of Mount Everest
Wall Street Journal | ‘The Ins and Outs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average’
FiveThirtyEight | UK election predictions are everywhere but, based on his track record, many will be particularly keen to see how this prediction from Nate Silver turns out
Tableau Public | A collection of very interesting and varied works submitted for the Tableau ‘Wiki Data Viz Contest’
i09 | ‘What Visualization Best Illustrated A Tricky Scientific Concept For You?’
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
Source | ‘Connecting the dots: Jake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots’
EagerEyes | Nice piece from Robert proposing a discussion about the concept and role of ‘complications’ in data vis
Cartonerd | Deep piece from Kenneth Field about the status of mapping in response to an earlier article ‘In defense of burger cartography’
New York Times | ‘In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive’
New York Times | ‘Learning to See Data’
SPD | Nice interview with NYT’s Jennifer Daniel
Computing Now | ‘Snapshot of Current Trends in Visualization’
Maarten Lambrechts | Excellent piece from Martin as he considers the ‘The rise of explorable explanations’
City Lab | ‘Why Most Twitter Maps Can’t Be Trusted’
Medium | ‘3 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations’
Ann K Emery | Ann presents ‘six alternatives to the clustered bar chart’
Dominikus | ‘Big Data and the end of everyday cheating’
Medium | Superb piece by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg ‘Design and Redesign in Data Visualization’
IEEE Computer Graphics | ‘Tapestry: A different kind of conference on storytelling with data’ by Robert Kosara
The Nib | Wonderfully illustrated article discussing the issues of skin colouring in art and design
Climate Lab Book | ‘The End of the Rainbow: An open letter to the climate science community’ {the visualisation room stands to applaud}
Medium | ‘The Joyless World of Data-Driven Startups’
FastCo Design | ‘UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry’
5W Blog | ‘The failing promise of GIS mapping in news (and some free maps)’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Vimeo | All the videos of the talks at FutureEverything 2015
YouTube | All the videos of the talks at Tapestry 2015
Vimeo | All the videos of the talks at FutureEverything 2015
Lena Groeger | I love this annotated slide deck/article from Lena NICAR 2015 talk about ‘drawing time’
Vis4 | Also from NICAR, Gregor wow’s the field with details of his Mr Chartmaker tool created for assisting with charting tasks at The Upshot
Google Docs | …and here’s Darla Cameron’s lightning talk ‘The end of maps, in seven charts’
Chrys Wu | Whilst we’re on the subject of NICAR, here’s Chrys’s collection of slides, links and tutorials
Adventures in Viz | Rob Radburn’s Tableau ‘Iron Viz’ entry explores whether it is ‘Better to be a Drogba than an Owen?’, here’s the design thinking
Axis Maps | A month full of good talks, here’s another interesting deck from Andy Woodruff titled ‘Blindfolded Cartography’
Rstudio | ‘Data Visualization cheatsheet, plus Spanish translations’
EECS Tufts | New paper: ‘Ranking Visualizations of Correlation Using Weber’s Law’ by Lane Harrison, Fumeng Yang, Steven Franconeri, and Remco Chang
Visual Loop | Typically wonderful collection of content and coverage from Malofiej 23
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
No Starch Press | New book: ‘Statistics Done Wrong’, by Alex Reinhart
ai2html | New resource: ‘Ai2html is an open-source script for Adobe Illustrator that converts your Illustrator documents into html and css.’
ArchieML | New resource: ‘ArchieML (or “AML”) was created at The New York Times to make it easier to write and edit structured text on deadline that could be rendered in web pages, or more specifically, rendered in interactive graphics.’
PatricioGonzalezVivo | New (digital) book: ‘The Book of Shaders’ by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo
The Imaginary Institute | New course: ‘2D Interaction and Animation is an 8-week online video class that will teach you to create powerful, expressive, and interactive computer graphics’
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
Design Boom | Photographers ‘cortis & sonderegger’ recreate history’s most memorable moments in miniature
Wired | ‘Brilliant car UIs from Monument Valley;s design geniuses’
its nice that | The Grand Budapest Hotel graphic designer on designing for Wes Anderson, “Everything in the film is there for a reason”.
Helftone | ‘Monodraw: Birth of an App Icon’
Shopikon | ‘The London globemaker who puts the world together’
FastCo Design | ‘Think You Could Draw The Apple Logo From Memory? Think Again.’
Vaguely Rude Places | An exploratory map highlighting some of the world’s more peculiar place names…