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 May 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.
Studio Terp | ‘The Brat Pack’
Data Dancing | ’50 days, 50 moves: An exploration of emotions, tracked with data, visualised through dance.’
New York Times | ‘What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed’
Judit Bekker | ‘Live-blogging a new project: The Coffees of Twin Peaks’
Sam Learner | ‘Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up’
@OptaAnalyst | ‘One touch. Just one. #LFC
@Alissonbecker’
Bloomberg | ‘Which States Are Closing the Racial Vaccine Gap, and Which Aren’t’
ONS | The first of two ‘scrollytelling’ pieces from the ONS in a series on economic inequality – ‘What are the regional differences in income and productivity?’
ONS | …and the second ‘Exploring local income deprivation’
SCMP | ‘Hogging the shots: Covid-19 exposes global vaccine inequity’
@darrenlonghk | …and here’s the print version in its native format glory
@giorgialupi | ‘Science Stack: Tools Within Reach – an interactive data visualization designed and developed for the Wilson Center, exploring low cost and open-source tools and hardware’
Reuters | ‘When the right wing rallies’
@Jasonforrestftw | Nice example of a bivariate colour scheme
New York Times | ‘The Art In The Oval Office Tells A Story. Here’s How To See It.’
Washington Post | ‘Inside the numbers of Stephen Curry’s record-setting April scoring spree’
@neilmontes | ‘Lemme share my Lego Charts. Think i made like 40 of them but unfortunately only a few survived’
Reuters | ‘#SOS: How India’s public, COVID-19 patients, and hospitals inundated Twitter with desperate pleas for help.’
@sportschord | ‘Every building in london, coloured by height’
@tamaramunzner | ‘A thread with the Hall of Fame for UBC’s grad #infovis course, highlighting several of the strongest projects’
Senseable City Lab | ‘Wanderlust: The Universal Visitation Law of Human Mobility’
Reuters | ‘Divided Highway: As a freeway comes down, Syracuse, New York, faces its legacy of segregation’
@tombellino | ‘Strava’s new global heat map shows why US planners should not rely on data from fitness apps to tell them where people are walking and biking’
@carlbaker | ‘How many people live in households without access to a car? ‘
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
The Economist | A great write-up about ‘How—and when—to use polar charts’
The Economist | …and similarly this further piece about ‘Visualising the distribution of data’
Fast Company | ‘Inside the design drama of a century: The fight over New York City’s subway map’
@jschwabish | ‘Four(plus) Ways to Visualize Geographic Time Data’
Kontinentalist | ‘Meet the Community! Ri Liu, data viz designer/developer’
@TheAthleticUK | ‘Exclusive — football data with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’
First Draft News | ‘Misinformation markers’
Nightingale | ‘The Five Rules of Harmony in the Art of Federica Fragapane’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Medium | ‘Project Showcase: Hormone Season for Scientific America’
@CT_Bergstrom | Typically smart analysis from Carl Bergstrom about the potential issues displayed in a chart that are signalled by data that should be ‘messy’ but appears too ‘clean’
PolicyViz | ‘Episode #196: Francis Gagnon’ – really interesting episode as Francis talks about the challenge of building a company around data visualisation
@crystaljjlee | ‘How do COVID skeptics on FB/Twitter use + interpret data? To find out, we analyzed half a million tweets, 41k data visualizations, + conducted a digital ethnography’
@EuroVisConf | ‘Geospatial networks are challenging to visualize. This survey with a novel design space and collection of 95 techniques is here to help!’
Tactile Graphics | ‘Improving Access To Graphical Images for Blind Students’
Sage Methods | ‘Minimizing Misrepresentation in Spatial Data Visualizations’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
LA Times | News that the super-talented Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee has joined the LA Times’ ‘Data and Graphics Department
@demartsc | ‘Really excited to announce that the Data Experience team at Visa has open sourced our chart components!’
Data Revelations | New Book: ‘The Big Picture: How to Use Data Visualization to Make Better Decisions’ by Steve Wexler
@mbostock | ‘Announcing a new open-source JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization: Observable Plot!’
@uniteditions | ‘Ken Garland will be much missed, he was a great designer, an inspiration to so many and a lovely man. Our monograph on his work is available to download for free as a PDF’
Nightingale | ‘Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes (or Why Nightingale Is Leaving Medium and Starting Its Own Site)’
Kickstarter | ‘Information Graphic Visionaries: Celebrating spectacular data visualization creators with new writing, complete visual catalogs & discoveries never seen by the public.’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
NPR | ‘COMIC: For My Job, I Check Death Tolls From COVID. Why Am I Numb To The Numbers?’
Aaron Hertzmann’s blog | ‘Why Does Line Drawing Work? A Realism Hypothesis’
YouGov | ‘Rumble in the jungle: what animals would win in a fight?’
Calico | ‘Calico, a web engine for interactive fiction made in ink’
@EngineMarvelous | ‘Finished another zoetrope. This time I wanted to make a tribute to one of the greatest animators, Hayao Miyazaki.’
@janezhgw | ‘New post: Why I’m Finally Learning to Draw’
The Guardian | ‘Why are our cities built for 6ft-tall men?’
USA Today | ‘Is Biden a giant? Is Carter tiny? How a wide-angle lens made Twitter explode over a presidential photo’
@matthen2 | ‘A large image of hundreds of flocking birds contains enough information to create an animation of a single bird flying’
@mslima | ‘Joris Putteneers considers himself a speculative architect, blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction architecture.’
@xkcdComic | ‘March 2020’
@RoyalstonDesign | ‘Here’s a vintage VHS inspired cover I made a few years back that I did for the entire MCU’