Articles

Yesterday there was a fair bit of twittering about a map that was ‘doing the rounds’. The map shows where 50% of the GDP of the US comes from geographically. I came across it via a tweet from Ian Sefferman.

On December 21st 2013 the New York Times published a project titled ‘How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk’, developed by Wilson Andrews and Josh Katz. The project is based on Josh’s own research exploring ‘Regional Dialect Variation in the Continental US’ building on questions and data from the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder.

Below you will find an embedded slideshare version of the slides used in last week’s talk at the Design of Understanding 2014 conference. I also did a similar (but longer) talk to students on a Editorial Media Design course at Hogeschool Utrecht the day before.

Big Data is a term that, according to the 2013 Gartner Hype Cycle, is reaching the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ and about to face the slippery decline down the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’.

I love slopegraphs. I’m happy to nail my colours to the mast and declare it. I’d probably not go as far as to wear a t-shirt with such a slogan but I feel a need to express my praise for the still-underused slopegraph and try help continue spread the word of its worth.

One of the re-occurring questions I get asked during or after a training workshop comes from delegates curious to know what tools were used to build ‘this’ or ‘that’ visualisation project.

Here’s a nice 12 minute movie from Swissinfographics featuring some of the best names in infographic design discussing the challenge of achieving clear and functional designs, the essence of the graphic design style that originated from Switzerland in the 50s termed ‘Swiss Style’.

Just a short post to log and share a really nice video. Titled ‘What Color is a Glacier?’, it is a submission for a student context run by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a ‘nonprofit organization of geophysicists, consisting of over 61,000 members from over 146 countries’.

There has been much discussion this past couple of days about John Burn-Murdoch’s article in the Guardian ‘Why you should never trust a visualisation’ which was itself a response to an earlier article by Pete Warden that proposed ‘Why you should never trust a data scientist’.

Over on Fell In Love With Data, Enrico Bertini has started a really interesting conversation about the best way to teach data visualisation. This is in contrast to the majority of conversations that typically take place around how best to learn data visualisation.