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 2015.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
De Statis | Nice interactive violin plot of the population in Germany by gender and over time
Dataphys | …and here’s a 2013 project to show the ‘Walkable Age Pyramid’ of the German population
Wall Street Journal | Collection of interactives celebrating ’50 Years of Avengers’
Tableau Public | A super slick Tableau project by Shine Pulikathara exploring five decades of crime in the US
Wait But Why | Exploring different ways of showing 7.3 billion people
Fast Print | ‘An interactive visualisation of all keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC’
Washington Post | Smart way of showing changes in Arctic ice extent over time (over many years) but when the focus is on the changes by month
SCMP | Exploring ‘China’s overseas investments’ by country over time
JMP Blog | Good effort from Xan Gregg to create a reworked version of the 3D yield curve using JMP
Domestic Streamers | ‘Domestic Data Streamers is a team of developers that have taken on the challenge of transforming raw data into interactive systems and experiences.’
Guardian | Whilst the UK election has been and gone, there are some tremendous techniques on show in this interactive ‘what did the opinion polls say about your seat?’
Telegraph | Whilst we’re talking about the elections, here’s a nice 5-way venn diagram showing the different possible outcomes
Metrocosm | ‘Filmed in NYC’ – mapping 3 years of film permits
Bloomberg | ‘For These 55 Marijuana Companies, Every Day is 4/20’
FastCo Design | ‘From Homer To J.K. Rowling: The World’s Greatest Storytellers, Visualized’
Wall Street Journal | ‘Is the Nasdaq in Another Bubble? A virtual reality guided tour of 21 years of the Nasdaq’
Jill Hubley | ‘NYC Street Trees by Species’
Washington Post | ‘Mapped: How hard it is to get across U.S. cities using only bike lanes’
Washington Post | ‘How happy is your country?’
New York Times | ‘Messenger’s Collision Course With Mercury’
Michael Pecirno | ‘Minimal Maps is an ongoing project that explores how single subject maps can give us new ways to understand our landscape.’
Vimeo | ‘Netherlands from above – Migration of Honey Buzzards’
Quartz | ‘This map shows where the strongest earthquakes are expected to strike
National Geographic | Detailed study of Detroit’s fall and rise
Visual Loop | ‘Revisiting the work of Hugo A. Sanchez’
Yale Environment | Finally a visualisation that merits using the architecture of the periodic table, not sure about the 3D graphic at the bottom though.
TheUpshot | ‘Tax Day: Are You Receiving a Marriage Penalty or Bonus?’
Pew Research Center | Interesting analysis of the ‘Future of World Religions’
Washington Post | ‘The history of American inequality, in 1 fascinating chart’
National Geographic | ‘On the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, explore the servicing missions that have made its 570,000 pictures of the universe possible.’
TheUpshot | ‘The Upshot Is One Year Old Today. Here Are the Stories You Clicked the Most.’ (What an amazing body of work already)
Politico | ‘This graphic shows how America’s partisan divide grew’
Washington Post | ‘An illustrated guide to all 456 deaths in Game of Thrones’
HBR | ‘Visualizing Sun Tzu’s The Art of War’
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
VizPainter | A relevant piece about the frustration of dealing with dates in Tableau (though to be honest you could extend that to most applications)
AIGA | ‘The case against paying designers by the hour’
Cartonerd | Kenneth Field explains the three different tests he applies when looking at and critiquing maps
Print Mag | ‘Chromatic Abstraction: Color as Data, Part 1’
Print Mag | …and here’s ‘Chromatic Abstraction: Color as Data, Part 2’ (it is from May but who cares about the rules of this post)
PolicyViz | ‘Communicating research: build a unicorn, don’t look for one’
Eager Eyes | Conference report from CHI 2015
New York Times | From all the way back in 2009, an interview with some of the NYT’s ‘interactive news collaborative’
5W Blog | ‘Is Lego the future of infographics?’
FiveThirtyEight | Like the tilted scatter plot to form the 2×2 matrix
99u | ‘Michael Bierut on Finding Your Voice’
Medium | An interesting and detailed criticism about a NYT visualisation of the Israeli conflict in Gaza (don’t agree with the accusations, knowing the journalists involved in creating the work)
Pew Research Center | ‘State of the News Media 2015’
Wired | ‘The cartographer who is transforming map design’
Guardian | ‘The hidden biases of Geodata’
Yanofksy | ‘There appears to be some disagreement on the location of Alaska’
Scientific American | ‘There’s No Infographic without Info (and other Lessons from Malofiej)’
HBR | ‘What to Do When People Draw Different Conclusions From the Same Data’
ONS | A style guide for the ONS to advise on the most appropriate use of language to use in descriptive commentary
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
OpenVisConf | All the videos of the talks at OpenVisConf 2015, presented via the typically brilliantly designed interface
Lena Groeger | One of the talks at OpenVisConf was by Lena titled ‘That’s the Power of Loops’, here are the slides.
Eventbrite | A collection of “D3.js Resources to Level Up”
BBC Internet Blog | ‘8 things I learnt while creating my first animation’
Webstock | Talk by Nicholas Felton: PhotoViz – ‘At the intersection of photography and data visualization is a place where optical techniques reveal complex phenomena and data viz starts to resemble a photographic process.’
Juice Analytics | ‘A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Tate | The Tate gallery has released a dataset that contains the ‘Concise catalogue entries’ for all wholly owned artworks in the Tate collection’
University of Chicago Press | pdf release of first three volumes of the book: ‘The History of Cartography’
Steve Haroz | New paper: ‘ISOTYPE Visualization: Working Memory, Performance, and Engagement’ by Steve Haroz, Robert Kosara and Steven Franconeri
Politico | ‘Nate Silver to Vox: Stop stealing our charts!’
PLOS | New Paper: ‘Beyond Bar and Line Graphs: Time for a New Data Presentation Paradigm’, by Tracey Weissgerber , Natasa Milic, Stacey Winham, and Vesna Garovic
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
Washington Post | Artisan Politics – ‘We asked four cartoonists to critique some presidential doodles’
Boing Boing | ‘Christopher Nolan’s hand-drawn Inception timeline’
New York Times | ‘How to Walk in New York’
Twitter | Another black and white printing fail…
Mirador | ‘Mirador is a configurable, extensible, and easy-to-integrate image viewer, which enables image annotation and comparison of images from repositories dispersed around the world’
Quantified Breakup | Discussing the digital consequence of a relationship breakup
BBC Technology | ‘Sat-navs and mobile apps threaten map-reading skills’
Guardian | ‘The best alternative election posters’
New York Times | The importance of editing: ‘The Man Who Makes the World’s Funniest People Even Funnier’
The User Is Drunk | ‘Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it. You can’t test that. I’ll do it for you.’ (for $500 per site)