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 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.
Washington Post | ‘Drought is the sleeper weather story you’ll hear more about in 2021’
Catherine Madden | ‘Journey Mapping, Emotional Waves, and Fiber Art Data Viz’
@ksituan | ‘THIS is what I was working on. I call it a “domino plot”, although I’m sure it’s already been invented:’
Cory Cone | ‘Birds and Birding at Patterson Park’
ProPublica | ‘What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Women of Color Were Shut Out of Congress For Decades. Now They’re Transforming It.’
@moritz_stefaner | Thread about the design/tech behind the new official German Covid-19 dashboard
Karim.News | The amazing portfolio of super-talented Karim Douïeb
National Geographic | ‘More than 6,000 maps from the magazine’s 130-year-long history have been digitally compiled for the first time.’
@MonaChalabi | ‘This was such a great thread about the new Covid strain. I turned it into some illustrations for people who are visual learners.’
@jonni_walker | ‘I often hear about colour coded words in titles and legends in Data Visualisation #DataViz so why not in cartography?’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘New NBA player ratings’
Jane Zhang | ‘This project is a tribute to my mom and grandmother, it explores the Chinese-Canadian identity through food.’
@WillMacNeil_VFX | ‘Very excited to share my latest personal project: D’istral. This generates a current weather painting in Houdini based on realtime data from Openweathermap.’
Andrea Giambelli | ‘Ferrari 1000+GP: Exploring the Prancing Horse’s first 70 years in Formula 1’
New York Times | ‘Trump’s legacy. Four turbulent years in the White House as recorded on the NYT front page’
The Economist | ‘Tracking Joe Biden’s first 100 days: The Economist is keeping tabs on his cabinet, progress and the latest polling’
New York Times | ‘The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021)’
@dr_xeo | ‘Your life depends on where you live’ [Translated]
Science News | ‘Explore every gravitational wave event spotted so far’
Reuters | ‘Stopping the spread: Reaching herd immunity through vaccination’
HeshLindsDataviz | ‘The Inside Scoop of Ben & Jerry’s: A look at the 98 ice cream flavors available around the world’
@infowetrust | ‘History of #dataviz is dominated by USA/France/UK for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is people like me can’t read other languages. Here’s an emerging thread of viz I ❤️ that I can’t read.’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
Evergreen Data | ‘Decolonizing Data Viz’
Gravy Anecdote | ‘After 12 months of covid-19 charts, what have we learnt?’
Source | ‘Exit Interviews: Aaron Williams’
Office for Statistics Regulation | ‘Upskilling Government leaders in data and statistical literacy’
Junk Charts | ‘Handling partial data on graphics’
Nightingale | ‘Earth at a Cute Angle’
John Grimwade | ‘Gray and yellow’
Editor X | ‘Designing data visualizations: An interview with Nadieh Bremer’
Evolving Newsroom | ‘Evolving Newsroom 2: Ashley Kirk, Visual Projects Editor at the Guardian’
Nightingale | ‘Data Visualization as Grief: What we gain when we think beyond spike maps, choropleths, and curvy case charts’
Nightingale | ‘Data Visualization in Parasite: Using fan art to build data stories’
d-spiegel | ‘Top tips to statisticians communicating through the media, especially in the time of COVID-19’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Brazilian Journalism Research | Paper: ‘Journalism, Data Visualization, and Perception about Readers’ by Rodrigo Cunha
Flourish | ‘Masters series: John Burn-Murdoch’s step-by-step animated line chart’
@pop_rebeca | Data vis video discussion about ‘the biggest trends of 2020, and trends to watch out for in 2021.’
Start.Me | ‘The BBC Africa Eye /Forensics Dashboard is a collation of some essential tools tailored to journalists using open source intelligence (OSINT) to carry out investigations on the African continent.’
Stats, Maps n Pix | ‘Which football team is nearest me?’
@FrankElavsky | ‘A thread on disability, race, and patriarchy in data visualization.’
People Like You | ‘Figuring out health research data: Stef Posavec spoke to Roz Redd and Helen Ward’
@AlliTorban | ‘When you’re new to #DataViz, creating your first project is daunting. Here’s how I started…’
@FILWD | ‘This is a really cool paper summarizing (with a taxonomy) existing techniques to visualize geospatial networks’
kristinhenry | ‘How big is 400,000?’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Data Sonification Archive | New website, ‘This curated collection is part of a broader research endeavor in which data, sonification and design converge to explore the potential of sound in complementing other modes of representation and broadening the publics of data.’
Unfolded | ‘Introducing Unfolded Studio – The Platform for Geospatial Analytics’
@opennews | ‘We’ve just launched a speaker rider for meaningfully inclusive events with @puddingviz’
@SarahNRodriquez | ‘Data Literacy has been a topic I’ve long spoken about. Evolving from enabling organizations, to advocating for many who lack education. Today I announce my website’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
@Datawrapper | ‘We think it’s save to say that humanity spent more time in 2020 than ever before looking at #dataviz…’
It’s Nice That | ‘The Burger King rebrand celebrates its design history and irreverent personality’
Dezeen | ‘This week a pink seesaw installation on the US-Mexico border was named Design of the Year’
The Fashion Ball | ’40 Designers That Thought About Every Single Detail’ (these sites are usually clickbait junk but I’m excepting this one)
@wblut | ‘While working at home (or living at work) I occasionally press play on an open Processing sketch. Still very much in love with these.’
New York Times | ‘The Year in Illustration 2020’
The Guardian | ‘If the aliens lay eggs how does that affect architecture? Sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds’
@HelenGradwell | ‘Anyone want a 2, 3 or 4 bedroom house designed for living?!’
@presentcorrect | ‘In 1773 Johann David Steingruber created a complete alphabet of mythical letter shaped buildings & their floorplans.’
It’s Nice That | ‘Vic Reeves and Yinka Ilori share insights to their creative process and studios in fun Samsung ads’