Best of the visualisation web… February 2014

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 February 2014.

Visualisations/Infographics

Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.

Data Remixed | ‘Visualizing History’ via a Presidential Gantt chart
hell

New York Times | ‘Is That a Luge in Times Square?’

Fathom | ‘2013 Year in Nike Fuel’

NZZ | Great long-form piece about snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov – designed and developed by Interactive Things (check out the YOLO flip graphic)

xkcd | ‘Frequency’

Mappingteam | ‘A Diorama of Player Movement in Sport’ (see article link too)

Bloomberg | ‘Bubble to Bust to Recovery’ – nice multi-tabbed digital story

The Variable Tree | ‘London maps and bike rental communities, according to Boris Bike journey data’

Arthur Buxton | ‘Colourstories – colour in picture book narrative’

Science Mag | ‘Science and the National Science Foundation present the winners of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.’

Flowing Data | ‘Using slime mold to find the best motorway routes’

Information Aesthetics | ‘Visualising Mill Road: Informing Communities by Infographics in the Street’

Refined Practice | ‘Visualising Ministerial Lobbying in the UK’

Moebio | ‘Life, the Universe, Everything: A Journey to the things that matter through Information Visualisation’

Facegroup | ‘How Stuff Spreads: How Videos Go Viral part I’

New York Times | Winner of a gold at Malofiej 23, the interactive stories created for the Sochi 2014 coverage. Good grief.

Business Insider | The connected scatterplot is rebadged as the ‘swirlogram’

Geo Visualist | ‘One Chart that Explains Why Ukraine was Vulnerable to Revolution’

Brandon Rose | Summer Olympics: A visualization of participant countries’ actual Olympic performance measured against predicted performance estimated using GDP, population, and past performance.

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

PolicyViz | The first of Jon Schwabish’s 8 (EIGHT) part overview detailing his experiences at Visualized conference

Scientific American | Great article by Jen Christiansen ‘Don’t Just Visualize Data—Visceralize It’

Hogeschool Utrecht | *Dreadful self-publicity klaxon* an video interview I gave data visualisation during my time at @ccjhu in Utrecht earlier in the year. Yes, I’d been out the night before.

SQL Server Blog | Article about the SQL Server Team’s thinking about data visualizations in relation to Power BI for Office 365

AEA | Great article from that man Schwabish (again) providing ‘An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data’ for the Journal of Economic Perspectives

FILWD | Enrico begins his excellent series of diary posts relating his experiences teaching information visualisation to students at NYU. To start with ‘Basic Charts’…

FILWD | …and here’s diary entry #2 ‘Beyond Charts: High-Information Graphic’

UX Blog | ‘Blind Spots, Blue Lights, and Campus Security’

Tableau Public | Andy Cotgreave compiles the ‘Most Influential Tableau-Related Blog Posts’

Nieman Journalism Lab | ‘The Guardian experiments with a robot-generated newspaper with The Long Good Read’…

The Long Good Read | …and another great and related piece on ‘Algorithmic newspapers and publishing’

Voilà | Oh man, this is turning into the Jon Schwabish show! (Jon, we should have made it $50, not $20). Anyway, here’s an interesting interview he gave with Francis Gagnon about his past, present and future in the field.

Voilà | And now another shout out for Francis, with his great round up of his experiences at Tapestry Conference 2014

The Economist | ‘Turning information into art’

Mother Jones | ‘This Map Does Not Show What Your State’s Favorite Band Is’

CIO | ‘What animated movies can teach you about data analysis’

Axismaps | ‘In Defense of Bad Maps’

Sensory Maps | ‘Design Dimension on BBC Radio 4 – Design & Desire through Smellwalking’ (Sadly, I think this may have now dropped off the schedules)

Perceptual Edge | ‘Are Mosaic Plots Worthwhile?’

Maarten Lambrechts | More discussion (in Dutch, but google translate is good) about plagiarism in data visualisation (this one is screemingly blatant!)

Untapped Cities | ‘Beautiful Maps, and the Lies They Tell, An Op-Ed From Runkeeper’

Visualized | Emerging collection of videos of the talks from this year’s Visualized event

FastCo Labs | ‘This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories’

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Source | ‘How we made “Behind the Bloodshed”: Behind the scenes with USA Today and Gannett Digital’

MIT Sloan | Process narrative from Damien Saunder describing ‘How We Made Nadal’s Interactive Game Tree’

Datavisualization.ch | Peter describes the process of creating *that* YOLO graphic

Vallandingham | ‘Let’s Make a Bar Chart with Lyra’

Junk Charts | Great piece by Kaiser ‘Knowledge in the chart and knowledge in the head’

Google Datasense | ‘This self-paced, online course is intended for anyone who wants to learn more about how to structure, visualize, and manipulate data.’ (whoops, the course closes on 4th April. Today is 4th April, get on it now)

ATH Creative | ‘My answer to the question: “So, what do you do?” (Part 2)’

Postgraphics | ‘Behind the Scenes: Mountains of the Olympics’

style.org | A summary of Jonathan Corum’s talk at the second Visualized conference: ‘The Weight of Rain’

Density Design | ‘Contropedia: Visualizing controversial topics on Wikipedia’

Fathom | ‘Game on! Data, in its multiple forms, can range from the very abstract to the most tangible. We tend to be type-agnostic, but recently a particularly clear set of data caught our eye: real-time position tracking for sports events.’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.

Eager Eyes | Launching NewsVis.org, the ‘Directory of News Visualizations’

Dataveyes | Nice new site design from the good folks at Dataveyes

Stanford | Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool (‘etcML’) on the web

Silk | ‘We just launched the new Explore page, which greatly improves the way you can visualize and filter the information on any Silk.’

Territory | Newly discovered site for ‘Territory Studio’ an independent, creative agency based in London working on some incredible design, motion and digital projects (particularly of interest those high-end works for Hollywood movies)

Think Insights | ‘Datagrams: Animated Instagram videos, created in real time with US Open stats.’

Amazon | New book: “Infographics: Human Body”, by Simon Rogers, Jenny Broom and Peter Grundy

ProPublica | ‘The ProPublica Data Store: ProPublica is making available the datasets that power our data journalism’

VenutureBeat | ‘Knowledge-based programming: Wolfram releases first demo of new language, 30 years in the making’

Github | New site: A single collection of the interactive data projects developed by Twitter

Palladio | New tool: ‘Palladio’ (beta) – ‘We are building a tool for data visualization in the humanities, help us improve it!’

UW Interactive Data Lab | New tool: Introducing ‘The Lyra Visualization Design Environment (VDE)’

Graf.ly | New tool: Graf.ly – ‘Use Graf.ly to present your data in ways that have previously only been available to teams of dedicated developers and designers’

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

The Functional Art | ‘Bill Gates emulates Hans Rosling’

Storyteller Game | Storyteller – A game about building stories

ProPublica | ‘Non-Profit Journalism: Issues around impact’

Devart | ‘Play the world: Visitors are invited to perform with a keyboard that finds samples with the same note in realtime from web radio stations from around the world, essentially allowing them to play the world.’

Spritz | Reading re-imagined: ‘Spritz’s mission is to change the way people read and make communication faster, easier, and more effective.’

Twitter | ‘I vote yes to this map’

Twitter | ‘As New York installs its first interactive subway maps, a reminder that Paris has had them since 1937’

Wonkviz | ‘Should I make a nested pie chart?’

Twitter | ‘Family game console from JC Penney, 1976’

Twitter | ‘Far too many ‘programming tutorials’ are like this’

Dean McNamee | ‘Bar Portraits: Image processing and portrait vectorization’