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 November 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Datalooksdope | On the premise that bigger words determines the perceived complexity of a piece of writing, this shows portrayals of different passages using bubbles instead of words (also tons of other interesting stuff)
Hunger Report | Impactive work that shows how much data is missing on different groups around the world
BBC Magazine | ’12 data maps that sum up London’
Tableau Public | Ben Jones offers an interactive Tableau map showing the ‘Railroads of the Contiguous United States’
Aviz | ‘Bertifier is a Web app for rapidly creating tabular visualizations from spreadsheets.’
Dataphys | A chronological ‘list of physical visualizations and related artifacts’
Bloomberg | Interesting dataset: ‘What companies are the market leaders within each industry?’
Charting the Beatles | ‘Song Structure: How did the form of Beatles songs evolve?’
Popular Science | ‘Cocktail calculus chart: The inner workings of recipes’
Data Pointed | ‘Crayon The Grids: Maps Of Street Layouts Colored By Orientation’
bsix12 | ‘East Meets West: An Infographic Portrait by Yang Liu’
The Guardian | All sorts of US mid-term election coverage goodness. Starting with the ‘Are you reflected in the new congress?’
New York Times | Something of a masterpiece. ‘The Most Detailed Maps You’ll See From the Midterm Elections’
WNYC | Super breakdown of the elections by WNYC, particularly with their comparisons for small differences in voting numbers for context
New York Times | ‘How Big Were Tuesday’s Republican Swings?’
Twitter Blog | ‘Interactive guide: the midterms’ web of influence on Twitter’
FastCo Design | Here’s a summary of ‘The Best Visualizations Of Yesterday’s Elections’
Washington Post | ‘Did Michael Brown charge? Eyewitnesses paint a muddled picture’
Friends in Space | Accurat’s project visualises the activity on ‘the first social network that extends beyond Earth’
BBC Science & Environment | ‘Rosetta mission: Can you land on a comet?’
New York Times | ‘Landing on a Comet, 317 Million Miles From Home’
Joey Cloud | The Pianogram: ‘how often each key gets pressed relative to the rest for a given piano piece. It is a piano-looking histogram!’
La Sombra Blogs | ‘Between two oceans’ – exploring the idea of uniting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via Nicaragua
ABC | ‘Map: 2010 Victorian election results like you’ve never seen them’
NPR | ‘New Players In The NBA: Big Data, User-Controlled Jumbotrons’
Poppyfield | Interactive version of Poppy Field by Valentina D’Efilippo and Nicolas Pigelet
LA Times | Interesting scatter plot showing ‘S.F. crime rate jumps while L.A. sees drop’
Scrollytelling | Collection of visual projects that encapsulate the idea of ‘scrollytelling’
Pinterest | ‘FT Graphics and design: A showcase for the most interesting, quirky and informative graphics, illustrations and page designs from the Financial Times’
Github | and… a collection of John Burn-Murdoch’s interactive works for the FT
ProPublica | ‘The Millions New York Counties Coulda Got’
Alllesss | Elegant collection of data art generated by tracing mouse movements
Culturegraphy | Explore the connections and influences between movies
The Upshot | ‘Who Would Have Health Insurance if Medicaid Expansion Weren’t Optional’
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
Junk Charts | Good profile of a brilliant front page NYT election chart
Wannabe Data Rockstar | ‘An inconvenient truth : Tableau is not a swiss army knife’
FastCo Design | ‘Ex-Googler On 4 Ways Designers Can Help The Working World Master Big Data’
Nautilus | ‘Five Ways to Lie with Charts’
Graphics Info | Nice summary by Simon looking back over his first year as Deputy Head of Graphics at ThomsonReuters
Policyviz | Jon discusses how ‘Sometimes a table is preferred to a graphic.’
Us Two | ‘The future of our past, or how to build a time machine’ (check out the xbox story)
Eager Eyes | ‘VIS 2014 Observations and Thoughts’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Gravy Anecdote | Terrific month-long 12-post series by Andy Cotgreave deconstructing the design choices for an internal Tableau contest
Junk Charts | Typically good analysis by Kaiser about the reorganisation required with an infographic
UW Graphics Group | Overview of the paper exploring alternate approaches to error bars
Dominikus | Slides and code from Dominikus’ and Moritz Stefaner’s tutorial at IEEE Vis 2014 ‘Everything except the chart’
Drawing with Numbers | ‘Getting Good at Tableau – the Screencast’
HCI Stanford | Paper: ‘The Value of Visualization’ by Jarke van Wijk
Bost.ocks | ‘How to Scroll: five rules for employing scrolling effectively’
National Geographic | ‘Goldilocks worlds: just right for life?’
Mapbox | ‘Making the most detailed tweet map ever’
Youtube | ‘The Art of Storyboarding with Ridley Scott’
Youtube | TEDTalk by Susan Etlinger: ‘What do we do with all this big data?’
University of Miami | ‘Nigel Holmes’ talk on humor and infographics’
Pinboard | Very useful collection of pinned articles, projects and other content saved over the years by Jane Pong
Sunlight Foundation | Collection of useful tools around information to do with political matters
Nature Graphics | One of several typically excellent design process posts from Nature, this one is about a Comet Landing graphic
Nature Graphics | …here’s another, this time about a graphic on The Great Depression
Medium | ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa: A metaphor on the diversity of visualization’ by Manuel Lima
Vimeo | ‘Tutorial – Visualization Analysis and Design’ by Tamara Munzner for a IEEE Vis 2014 Tutorial’
Andy Woodruff | ‘Value-by-alpha Maps: An Alternative Technique to the Cartogram’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Information is Beautiful Awards | As the title suggests, here are the 2014 winners and runners up in recent awards process
The Guardian | ‘Crazy paving: the twisted world of parquet deformations’
iVisDesigner | New Platform: ‘iVisDesigner stands for Information Visualization Designer, which is a platform in which users can interactively create customized information visualization designs for a wide range of data structure’
IBM | ManyEyes gets another little reboot…
The Marshall Project | New site: ‘The Marshall Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization covering America’s criminal justice system’
CartoDB | ‘Unlimited map views start today!’
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
PSFK | ‘Japanese Cartographers Create Printable 3D Maps for the Blind’
Meshu | New range of data jewellery and other data driven sculptured products…
Monochrome | …And this also from Rachel Binx allows you to print a custom map on arrange of clothing items
The Poke | ‘Richard Scarry’s Busy Town Jobs For The 21st Century’
Type Genius | ‘Find the perfect font combo for your next project’
FastCo Design | ‘Where Do Designers Go To Work After College?
Earth Pics | ‘9 funny and vintage ads for modern technology’
nuSchool | ‘Your Free Design Work Will End Up In The Trash’
YouGov | A free app to showcase YouGov’s profiles, a segmentation and media planning tool