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 April 2021.
Notes: the items listed may not have been necessarily published during this month, rather discovered during the month. Some links point to paywall items. The details shown below label the platform/site each item is published on – not necessarily the actual author – and a brief selective description.
Visualisations & Infographics
Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.
@CraigTaylorViz | ‘Spring is around the corner so I’ve been spending my evenings cultivating ‘England’s Commuter Garden!”
@dr_xeo | ‘Where and when have there been more or fewer hours of sun in the last 38 years in Portugal and mainland Spain?’ [Translated from Spanish]
@framoriniii | ‘My latest work for the latest digital issue of
@PopSci
is out! I made a data illustration on Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting and its colours.’
@_kathchan_ | ‘Re-imagining 20,903 Chinese characters as data art’
@J_CD_T | ‘Better days lie ahead for the underachievers of English football’
Washington Post | ‘Here’s just how unequal the global coronavirus vaccine rollout has been’
Reuters | ‘Europe’s vaccine hesitancy’
New Statesman | ‘Covid-19 robbed a decade of life from the average victim in England and Wales’
NPR | ‘Comic: For My Job, I Check Death Tolls From COVID. Why Am I Numb To The Numbers?’
@data_jackalope | ‘*Brilliant* data viz showing the musical features of whale songs. Gorgeous in print, but the digital version has the added experience of audio.’
Tableau Public | ‘The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is one of the greatest cinematic achievements of our time. This data visualization shows the Fellowship’s journey in the movies and how much dialogue the characters had in each location.’
Quartz | ‘How the pandemic pummeled the world’s most famous shopping streets’
Washington Post | ‘How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions’
Doug McCune | ‘Envisioning these wildfire sculptures mounted on a wall relative to their actual geographic locations’
New York Times | ‘Biden’s $4 Trillion Economic Plan, in One Chart’
Behance | ‘Artwork for BBC Science Focus. The visualization explores the space debris, divided by their average distance from Earth and type of object’
Washington Post | ‘Why your state might lose or gain clout in Congress after the census is released’
New York Times | ‘Incarcerated and Infected: How the Virus Tore Through the U.S. Prison System’
IvettAlexa | ‘Around the world, only a small handful of countries stand out by their female representation on the currency.
Guess who is on the most banknotes today?’
World Bank | ‘Together with Maarten Lambrechts and Beyond Words Studio we have created the Data Stories companion website for the World Bank World Development Report 2021’
@jhjanicki | ‘For the #30DayChartChallenge on animals, I decided to revamp one of my unused prototypes on bats and make it into an interactive bat facts wheel’
Polititweet | ‘How do Belgian political leaders use Twitter?’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Is Soccer Wrong About Long Shots?’
Volcano Listening Project | ‘Volcano visualization: A modern take on “Comparative Heights of Mountains”‘
YouTube Neil Halloran | ‘A Skeptical Look at Climate Science: Degrees of Uncertainty is an animated data-driven documentary about climate science, uncertainty, and knowing when to trust the experts’
The Guardian | ‘Speed at which world’s glaciers are melting has doubled in 20 years’
McKinsey | ‘Test your ideas on how postpandemic consumers may behave’
The Marshall Project | ‘The Language Project’
ETH Zurich | ‘soccerbars: Word-sized tallies for series of association football match results’
@SCMPgraphics | ‘We love how you can drill really deep into a story with digital but there’s something truly special about the tactile nature of print. Compare our print and online story on city planning post-coronavirus’
@Tableau_Picasso | ‘If you run in the City of God, the beast catches you; if you stay, the beast eats you.’
Reuters | ‘Carbon recyclers: How ocean ecosystems help fight climate change’
The Pudding | ‘Following the Science: A look at the global research effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
Medium | ‘Adventures with metrics in The Times and The Sunday Times newsrooms’ (multi-part series)
Ed Conway | ‘Bitcoin, money and the planet’
The Covid Tracking Project | ‘(The Perils of) Automatically Collecting COVID Data’
The Breakthrough Institute | ‘Absolute Decoupling of Economic Growth and Emissions in 32 Countries’
The Athletic | ‘The rise of analytics in women’s football’
Kontinentalist | ‘Meet the Community! Catherine Ma, Communications PhD student at University of Miami’
Data Journalism | ‘The story behind Datawrapper’
Nightingale | ‘The Most Important Role You’re Not Hiring for Your Data Team: The Information Architect’
New York Times | ‘Why We Redesigned the Virus Trackers’
Stamen | ‘Some thoughts on multivariate maps and their use in the wild’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Wikimedia | ‘Research:Optimization of data visualizations on Wikipedia in thumbnail format’
YouTube V&A Dundee | ‘Data and Design: Making stories visible’
@_mcnutt_ | ‘I’m delighted to finally share our #CHI2021 paper that takes a meta-language approach to visual analytics.’
Small Multiples | ‘Mapping Where The Mountain Meets The River in East-Asia’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
The Functional Art | ‘Announcing the Data Journalism Podcast’
Data Revelations | New Book: ‘The Big Picture’ by Steve Wexler
Datawrapper | ‘We’re improving the accessibility for Datawrapper charts and maps’
Chartability | New site: ‘Chartability is a toolkit to help people make more accessible dataviz.’
Observable | ‘Announcing the Women’s History Month DataViz Contest Winners’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
Culture Study | ‘Against “Feel Free To Take Some Time If You Need It”‘
@GarethWild | ‘For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all. This week I completed my Magnum Opus! A thread.’
Universal Everything | ‘Run Forever: A video artwork visualising hydrogen mobility’
The Technium | ‘1,000 True Fans’
@stamen | ‘Check out “Scale-a-Tron”, a tool that lets you compare the sizes of geographic shapes on a satellite map!’
@JoaquimCampa | ‘Windows of the World. Thread’