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 January 2013.
You’ll see that I’m trying out a new structure in response to recent (and, to be fair, historic and avoided!) feedback:
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Creative Bits | Annual repots become infographics
BitAesthetics | Paul Butler introduces a new way of looking at and visualising flight options
New Scientist | Global view of warming temperatures, let’s you see how things have changed over time in a location of your choosing
Guardian US | The good folks in the Interactive team re-deploy the framework used for last year’s popular gay rights visualisation, this time applied to gun laws state-by-state
UX Blog | ‘People dots: Seattle area commuting’ – More magic from John Nelson.
Propublica | Elegant interactive infographic examination of where Congress stands on gun issues
FastCo Design | ‘How A Civil War Vet Invented The American Infographic’
Biofabric | An alternative to the hairball network – ‘BioFabric uses a novel network presentation method that represents nodes as horizontal line segments, one per row.’
Guardian Datablog | ‘Black and white and read all over: 27 Guardian graphics from its history’
BBC News | ‘Tube 150th anniversary: How the Underground map evolved’
UX Blog | ‘A national portrait of drunk driving’
FastCo Design | ‘An App That Uses Dataviz To Digitally Track Your Moods’
FastCo Design | ‘Infographic: Sculptures Made By Measuring Wi-Fi Signals’
UX Blog | Another one from John Nelson (busy month John!) – this one is about ‘Biking and Walking to Work’
Neoformix | ‘The project ‘Novel Views’ consists of a series of visualizations of the novel Les Miserables’
LA Times | ‘How fast is the LAFD where you live?’
Guardian Datablog | ‘US presidential inauguration speeches: how does Obama’s second compare?’ – guest work by Santiago Ortiz
Bloomberg | Interactive ranking and comparisons of the world’s richest people.
Infosthetics | ‘TweetPing: Revealing worldwide Twitter activity in real time’
Adriano Attus | Super collection of painstakingly hand made and crafted visualisations
Flowing Data | How do you with the ‘Mercator Map Puzzle’?
Graphics Info | Infographic looking at the arteries of transit routes through Hong Kong
jnd.org | ‘Complexity is good, simplicity is overrated’
fjordnet | And on a related matter… ‘5 problems with simple’
Articles
The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse and interviews
Perceptual Edge | Stephen discusses his hopes for 2013, specifically a desire for a ‘slow data’ movement (as well as small and sure)
Guardian Environment | Australia adds new purple colour to its temperature maps as heat levels soar
Civic Infographics | Nice article by Guilio about infographics as a link between analysis and communication
aaronsw | Amongst endless articles written about the sad death of Aaron Swartz, this was an interesting account he wrote himself of his time on Edward Tufte’s course
SND | ‘Looking back: Page through Michael Stoll’s treasure island of infographic textbooks’
Daily M**l | Awful newspaper and website but I’m a sucker for visual illusions so there you go
Mother Nature Network | ‘How fast could you travel across the US in the 1800s?’
Civic Infographics | A subject close to my heart, ‘The Scandal of Clarity’
m.e.driscoll | ‘Data visualisation is a Halfway House’. (Though now I’ve re-read it properly, realised I misunderstood the argument. Read this for good follow up)
Perceptual Edge | Stephen introduces the concept of ‘Bandlines’ – sparklines enriched with information about magnitude and distribution
Software Studies Initiative | Lev Manovich’s article ‘presents visualization analysis of the films The Eleventh Year (1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by the famous Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov’
FastCo Design | ’10 Companies On The Cutting Edge Of Sports Data’
The Functional Art | Alberto discusses the emotive reaction in ‘Guns, data and infographics’
National Infographic | ‘Reinventing Nat Geo art, maps and graphics for the iPhone’
Tableau | Andy Cotgreave’s round up of the Best of the Tableau web during December 2012. That’s a good idea…
Graphic Sociology | Article exploring a range of vintage infographics about the US (such as disease mapping, propaganda pieces etc.)
Vis4.net | If you do nothing else but read the first two lines you will learn from this piece.
Eager Eyes | ‘The State of Information Visualization, 2013’ – Robert’s look back over 2012 and view of 2013 and beyond
Klevr.org | Interview with Alberto Cairo ‘Exploring The World With Infographics & Data Visualizations’
Economist | Reflective look through the task/demands of creating a suitable visualisation/chart
Viewtific | ‘The “art” of compromise: Is there room for compromise in designing data graphics?’
LinkedIn | Hilary Mason discusses how to ‘find a great data science job’
Presentation Zen | Discussing the need to teach visual literacy and citing interviews with Martin Scorsese and George Lucas
Core77 | ‘Things every Designer should do at least once in their career’
Learning & Development
These links cover tutorials, learning opportunities, how-tos etc.
VizWiz | Andy shows a workaround for how to create Stream Graphs in Tableau 8
Word of Data | Rene pulls together a range of options for learning and developing data visualisation skills and knowledge
Indiana University | Announcing the launch of the IU Information Visualisation MOOC
JBDeaton | ‘How to generate ternary plots in Matplotlib’. It is a brief tutorial but really included because I like the idea of a ternary plot.
DashingD3.js | Collection of d3.js tutorials and general learning resources
Presentation Zen | ’13 great books to help you succeed, create, & communicate better in 2013′
Speaker Deck | Scott Murray’s slides from Visual.ly meetup in San Francisco – ‘The Value of Process’
The Why Axis | Guest post from Job Schwabish – ‘Breaking Excel Defaults – A Government Chart Remake’
The Functional Art | Another issue dear to me ‘Intuitiveness vs. learnability in interactive visualization’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
blprnt | “New Year, New Company: Introducing The Office for Creative Research”
Malofiej21 | The Malofiej 21 site is launched including announcements on the speakers and conference schedule
Form Follows Function | Beautifully crafted site let’s you explore a collection of interactive experiences
Google Books | ‘Information Design: An Introduction’, by Rune Pettersson.
Interactive Isotype | New site I came across that focuses on content relating to ‘adding interactivity and animations to static isotype productions’
Datavisualization.ch | 13 Conferences to attend in 2013
Flowing Data | First announcement of Nathan’s new book (coming out in April time)
Brainpickings | New book ‘100 Diagrams that Changed the World’, by Scott Christianson
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
Info.cern | Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for an information management system that, as I understand, seemed to do well
Laughing Squid | ‘Original Star Wars Trilogy As Maps’
FastCo Design | ‘A Gloriously Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Of NYC’
Bureau of Investigative Journalism | Sub-site dedicated to data around the covert war on terror, particularly interesting as it contains great deal of data on drone strikes