Best of the visualisation web… September 2020

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 September 2020.

Notes: the items listed may not have been necessarily published during this month, rather discovered during the month. Some links point to paywall items. The details shown below label the platform/site each item is published on – not necessarily the actual author – and a brief selective description.


Visualisations & Infographics

Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.

@adamrpearce | ‘Explore COVID-19 Symptoms Search Trends’

Datawrapper | ‘These scatter plots of heat and rain helped me understand our changing climate’

New York Times | ‘The True Colors of America’s Political Spectrum Are Gray and Green’

Stanford | ‘Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination’

@CedScherer | ‘Not my cup of coffee…’

ESPN | ‘Mapping College Football Crowds and COVID Risk’

Washington Post | ‘What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood?’

Reuters | ‘Collision course: How a Japanese bulk carrier strayed from shipping lanes before disaster struck’

@eleanor_lutz | ‘A very informative “how to vote” special issue is in the print @nytimes today’

Bloomberg | ‘Fight over fish fans a new stage of conflict in South China Sea’

New York Times | ‘Charting an Empire: A Timeline of Trump’s Finances’

Flowing Data | ‘Timeline of California Wildfires’

ProPublica | ‘New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States’

@JanWillemTulp | ‘NEW — side project, a simulation to get an intuitive sense of how fast #COVID19 is spreading in each country, see it, and hear it!’

@jasontreat | ‘Happy Dino Day! Today we’ve published Reimagining Dinosaurs, a broad and deep dive on the most exciting ever for dinosaur research.’ (Thread)

karim_douieb | ‘”Noisy City” with three sound waves is an audible dataviz experiment aiming at making you physically feel the noise pollution happening in Brussels’

@laessr | ‘New side project: The Colors of Jean Giraud — A homage the great comic artist Moebius.’

New York Times | ‘Which Police Departments Are as Diverse as Their Communities?’

Pentagram | ‘A series of data visualizations highlight the Global Goals for Sustainable Development with surprising facts that inspire people to take action’

Periscopic | An update to the classic ‘gun deaths’ visualisation

@h_i_g_s_c_h | ‘Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker’

@JZarracina | ‘The destruction of the wildfires raging across the western states is overwhelming’

The Guardian | ‘Electoral college explained: how the US election is an uphill battle for Biden’

@HeikkiVesanto | ‘The road from every townland in Ireland to Dublin’

New York Times | ‘How a Massive Bomb Came Together in Beirut’s Port’

@OrdnanceSurvey | ‘The cartographic challenges of mapping Britain’s motorway junctions’

Pablo Robles | Outstanding new portfolio collection

@samjoiner | ‘”I found a database of all 8.3m trees in London!” And so our project on the UK’s urban forests began…’

@sdbernard | ‘Animation showing how smoke from the wildfires on the west coast of the US is affecting areas as far away as New York, and even northern Europe’

Pudding | ‘Why are K-pop groups so big?’

dataisbeautiful | ‘I wrote a script which builds the face of an animal based on the population number of the species’

Washington Post | ‘Nobody can predict this election. Here’s why.’

Reuters | ‘The pace of death’

@John_M_Nelson | ‘Sparkline map of coronavirus cases since Feb, updated daily.’

New York Times | ‘The Battleground States Biden and Trump Need to Win 270’

Articles

These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.

The Correspondent | ‘How maps in the media make us more negative about migrants’

Vivid Data Visualization | ‘Data visualization storytelling from within its industrial culture of uniqueness’

Medium | ‘How we used data to design modern record certification plaques’

@distillpub | ‘Communicating with Interactive Articles’

@encode_info | ‘What is the Future of Dataviz Festivals?’

Dataviz Shef | ‘Data Visualization’s Social Role’

Nightingale | ‘How Tekken Reinvented My Data Visualization Design Process’

Junk Charts | ‘Unlocking the secrets of a marvellous data visualization’

SSRC | ‘Visualizing a Pandemic: Epistemological Conflicts over Covid-19 Data on Social Media’

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Datawrapper | ‘How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations’

Observable | ‘A Quantitative Approach to Colour Palette Selection’

Stack Magazines | ‘Making sense of coronavirus’ podcast interview with Rob Orchard, one of the editors behind Delayed Gratification, the quarterly news magazine

YouTube | ‘How to Read Uncertainty Visualizations’ talk by Lace Padilla

TED | Christoph Niemann TED2018 ‘You are fluent in this language (and don’t even know it)’

Imperial | ‘Visualising Uncertainty: A Short Introduction’

@dataliteracycom | ‘”Data Literacy Fundamentals” was created for all who are just getting started on their data journey, and for those looking to go back and lay a more firm foundation. ‘

Taylor & Francis Online | Paper: ‘Data Organization in Spreadsheets’ by Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo

EagerEyes YouTube | ‘Chart Appreciation: Driving Safety, in Fits and Starts’

Visual Cinnamon | ‘Data art posters about music (streaming) data for Sony Music’

Pudding | ‘How to make dope shit! Part 3: Storytelling’

Ada Lovelace Institute | ‘Should more public trust in data-driven systems be the goal?’

Eytan Adar | Paper: ‘Communicative Visualizations as a Learning Problem’ by Eytan Adar and Elsie Lee

Cornell | Paper: ‘What Do We Actually Learn from Evaluations in the “Heroic Era” of Visualization?’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.

@Datawrapper | ‘Big (big!) map update! Our choropleth and symbol maps are now simpler to create, quicker to load, and more beautiful.’

@jscarto | ‘You can now browse NASA Earth stories by location’

Gizmodo | ‘Engineers Have Figured Out How to Make Interactive Paper’

Waterstones | New book: ‘
Underground Cities: Mapping the tunnels, transits and networks underneath our feet (Hardback)’ by Mark Ovenden

Medium | ‘Creating an animated smoke map’ – a ‘how to’ post from Steve linked to the project listed above

Cambridge Intelligence | ‘Introducing KronoGraph: Timeline visualizations that drive investigations’

Truth and Beauty | ‘Deep Learning UX: Can we teach machines to design?’

Sundries

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.

The Guardian | ‘Facts v feelings: how to stop our emotions misleading us’

Design Council | ‘Design Council Impact Report’

@adamemccann | ‘Painting with Tableau: A “painting” of my home in Tableau with the help of RStudio and ProCreate.’

Bloomberg | ‘Choose the perfect streaming TV bundle’

The Guardian | ‘A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?’

@chromato_mania | ‘A 6 inch aerial embroidery complete with 3D hills’

This Is Colossal | ‘A New Book Chronicles the 125-Year History of the Button, Its Design, and Its Role in Cultural Change’

@mikebrondbjerg | ‘OK, Illustrators… I have a question. If you want to add a highlight (B) and a shadow (C) to a particular colour (A), how do you approach choosing those colours?’ (Some great replies)

Youtube | ‘Blade Runner: San Francisco’

Open Culture | ‘A Short Introduction to Caravaggio, the Master Of Light ‘