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 December 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Popular Science | ’15 charts, graphs and maps that will shape the future of information.’
Bloomberg | ‘2014 Is Likely to Be the Earth’s Hottest Year Ever. Why It Doesn’t Matter’ – love the plot half way down
Washington Post | Inevitably, being December, there were several ‘Year in graphics’ collections. Here’s one from the Washington Post…
New York Times | …here’s the New York Times’
Quartz | … and from Quartz
Zeit Online | … this one from Zeit Online
Reuters | …next up is the Reuters graphics collection
WSJ | …The WSJ’s year of interactive graphics
CartoDB | Rivers in the US coloured by the direction in which they flow
NZZ | In contrast to the previous links, this is an interactive visualisation chronicling and analysing a year of published content
Senseable | ‘Art Traffic at the Louvre: A study of visitors’ behaviour using Bluetooth data’
Marion-Luttenberger | Interesting portfolio of creative, physical/ambient infographic work
Washington Pomarst | ‘Most Americans’ best days are behind them’
The Bump | Nice way to show the relative size of a baby week-by-week
Wired | ‘A Web App That Visualizes Wikipedia as a Starry Galaxy of Articles’
BBC | ‘Jihadism: Tracking a month of deadly attacks’
Bloomberg | ‘Pain at the Pump: Gasoline Prices by Country
Buckets | Terrific interactive NBA player dashboards
New York Times | ‘A Record Year for Auto Recalls’
Creative Review | ‘The soundscape of New York’ – physical visualisations
Eye See Data | A really terrific detailed bump chart showing the history of Fifa World Rankings
Bloomberg | More interactive storytelling excellence from the Bloomberg Visual team, this one profiling ‘Climate Change in Perspective’
Muyueh | A deep exploration into how ‘Different languages have different ways to describe color’
Boston Globe | ‘This is how Congress connects on Twitter’
Tabletop Whale | Animated infographic showing ‘How to build a human’
ProPublica | ‘Inside the Firewall: Tracking the News That China Blocks’
On Broadway | ‘The interactive installation ON BROADWAY represents life in the 21st-century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan.’
Washington Post | ‘The brutal methods outlined in the Senate report’
ncase | Enjoyable ‘segregation simulator’ – “This is a story of how harmless choices can make a harmful world”.
Wired | From MapLabs: ‘Our Favorite Maps of the Year Cover Everything From Bayous to Bullet Trains’
The Acme Catalog | ‘BIG BATS is a search through historical data (1903-2013) for performances by players who seemed like they were literally playing with a larger bat than everyone else.’
FiveThirtyEight | Love this analytical enquiry: ‘The Final ‘Hobbit’ Film Is An Unprecedentedly Gratuitous Stretch Of Source Material’
TheUpshot | ‘The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind’
Truth and Beauty | Love these remixes of Hans Rosling’s famous graphics, redesigned for print
City Geographies | ‘Understanding Household Energy Use in England & Wales’
What Color Is It? | 6 digit time converted in to a hex coloured background that constantly changes as time does. Dead simple. Dead good.
New York Times | ‘What We’re Searching For’
WSJ | ‘Who’s News: Rank business leaders on the Journal’s influence grid.’
Tableau Public | The remixer becomes the remixed… A stunning reworking of Moritz Stefaner’s ‘Notabilia’ by Mark Jackson
NZ Herald | ‘Visualising 268,000 tonnes of floating plastic in the world’s ocean’
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
Visual Loop | Nice round up of ’40 must-watch keynotes of 2014:
presentations held at the top data vis events and at local meetups’
Ann K Emery | Nice piece by Ann that explains how the brain is the best visualisation tool of all time
Sandra Rendgen | ‘A window into a concept: Interview with Bryan Christie’
Typeset in the Future | Discussing typography in sci-fi (part 3)
Floating Sheep | ‘Deconstructing the (most detailed tweet) map (ever)
Cartonerd | Kenneth Field offers up his ‘Favourite maps from 2014’
If We Assume | ‘What I have to say may shock some of you: the rainbow color map isn’t dead, and it shouldn’t be’. Boom indeed!
Lulu Pinney | Nice end of year video summary of Lulu’s work during 2014
ProPublica | ‘Introducing Landline and Stateline: Two Tools For Quick Vector Maps in your Browser’
Journalism | ‘Ophan: Key metrics informing editorial at the Guardian’
Huffington Post | ‘What Links Magic and Data Visualization?’
Guardian | ‘When data gets creepy: the secrets we don’t realise we’re giving away’
Washington Post | ‘Why we draw’ by Richard Johnson
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Zapier | Some useful suggestions in this: ’20 New Productivity Apps from 2014 that You Need to Try’
Animated Data | ’10 D3.js Must Knows’
Government Statistical Service | ‘Effective graphs and tables in official statistics’ – interesting to see this guidance which is for producers of official statistics “who need to design graphs and tables that are clear, consistent, informative and easy to use”
Juretriglav | …Same but different (huh?) kind of reference, this one being about the ‘Standards for Scientific Graphic Presentation’ for the NYCTA
Nature Graphics | More design narrative goodness from Nature, this one looking at ‘Life on the Brink: Visualising Extinction’
Marcin Ignac | Transcribed slides (à la Jonathan Corum) from Marcin’s talk at Visualized.io in London, November 2014. I missed the talk but heard great things about it.
Urban Institute | ‘Raising the standards of data journalism’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
D3 Deconstructor | ‘The D3 Deconstructor is a Google Chrome extension for extracting data from D3.js visualizations’
Amazon | New book: ‘Data Scientists at Work’, by Sebastian Gutierrez
Data Viz Done Right | Nice new site launched by Andy Kriebel ‘Highlighting data viz best practices around the web’
Glitchart | New tumblr site tracking glitchy visualisation mistakes that in themselves are fascinating displays
BMJ | Not a new site but new to me, the collection of infographics work for the British Medical Journal
YouTube | New book: ‘Instant Expert’, by Nigel Holmes. This is a video of Nigel introducing the book with a link to the amazon page contained.
CartoDB | ”Odyssey.js: New open source tool to weave interactive stories by CartoDB
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
Analytics FC | ‘500 words on….what is Football Analytics and how can I get involved?’
All the Minutes | Shows random selected tweets that mention the time you are at right there and then
BBC | ‘Marriage proposal mapped out by Portsmouth jogger’s app’
EarthSky | Showing some incredible ultra-long exposure photos of the sky between the June and December solstice.
Core77 | ‘How retailers get order from chaos: Plan-o-grams’
Gizmodo | ‘Microsoft Is Killing Clip Art Because Nobody Uses It Anymore’
Quipsologies | ‘This placemat looks as if the tableware warped it’
Core77 | ‘Should the Royal Mail be jumping on the 3D printing bandwagon?’
Channel 101 | Dan Harmon’s multi-part series about Story Structure