Best of the visualisation web… August 2021

Since 2010 I have compiled and published monthly collections of links to some of the best, most interesting, or thought-provoking data visualisation-related content I come across. These collections are not always published immediately after the month in question has ended, but I try to do so as soon as my workload permits!

Here’s a collection of some of the best content I encountered during August 2021.

The items listed may not have been necessarily published in the month, rather I will have discovered them during the month to which this post relates. Note that some links point to paywall items so may not be accessible to everyone. The details included are the platform or site each item is published on – not necessarily the actual author – and a brief description.


Visualisations & Infographics

Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.

Bloomberg | ‘Who Won at the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games’

Flowing Data | ‘Cycle of Many, a 24-hour snapshot for a day in the life of Americans’

New York Times | ‘Tokyo Olympics: Who Leads the Medal Count?’

Youtube | ‘Fictional starships size comparison’ by MetaBallStudios

Nightingale | ‘Data-Driven Album Covers’

SCMP | ‘Olympic defectors’

Quartz | ‘We read the 4000-page IPCC climate report so you don’t have to’

@gelliottmorris | Excellent technique for displaying the range of possible outcomes from the German election (that took place in September)

Washington Post | ‘Olympic host countries (usually) win more medals. Here’s how they do it.’

Reuters | ‘What will it be like when we go back to the office?’

The Pudding | ‘Ranking the Biggest NBA Finals Carry Jobs’

FiveThirtyEight | ‘Which Countries Are Doing Better — Or Worse — Than Expected At The Tokyo Olympics?’

Nightingale | ‘Putting Three Meals on the Table’

IPCC | ‘IPCC WGI Interactive Atlas’

@emollick | ‘The Internet is rotting. This chart shows the percentage of links from all New York Times articles that still work.’

Washington Post | ‘How has the racial makeup of your neighborhood changed since 1990?’

New York Times | ‘The Black Mortality Gap, and a Document Written in 1910’

The Pudding | ‘A visual history of Rickrolling’

New York Times | ‘179 Reasons You Probably Don’t Need to Panic About Inflation’

@kennethfield | ‘Just some top-of-the-head doodles as alternatives to breaking the bar’

@USGS_DataSci | ‘A look at streamflow conditions across USGS Water Streamgages the for the month of July’

Science | ‘New variants have changed the face of the pandemic. What will the virus do next?’

Reuters | ‘Flights over Kabul: A look at some of the military and civilian aircraft that operated out of Kabul airport after the Taliban took control of the capital’

@KimMoranJones1 | ‘A year of temperature minima and maxima, and UK COVID deaths, recorded in fabric. Data visualisation has a new medium…’

@Mariano_Zafra | ‘From Tokyo 1964 to Tokyo 2020: pulverized records and twice the number of athletes and disciplines’ [Translated from Spanish]

@markabelan | ‘Visualizing the Biomass of Life’

@btjakes | ‘The Sun, one side of a poster… all about our home star, over days, decades, and billions of years.’

@theneilrichards | ‘Here’s my “The Hundred” visualisation – every ball bowled in 2021’

The Guardian | ‘Evacuating Afghanistan: a visual guide to flights in and out of Kabul’

Pollinator Park | ‘The story of Dr Beatrice Kukac, devoted scientist and founding mother of Pollinator Park’

New York Times | ‘How Record-Breaking Rainfall Flooded Middle Tennessee’

Articles

These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.

Nightingale | ‘How To Get Your Design Ideas Through a Client’

The Economist | ‘Between the lines: How to declutter a chart’ by Rosamund Pearce

Slowbuild | ‘People-centered data, with Jer Thorp’

@geoviews | ‘ChocoTopo: topographic 3D-chocolate’

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Dataset Finder | A very useful tool to search (randomly or selected) the archive of ‘Data is Plural’ by Amelia Wattenberger

Design Observer | ‘The Design of Business | The Business of Design: S9E8: Jan Diehm’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.

@_Lorna_Brown | New book coming soon… ‘Tableau Desktop Cookbook’ by Lorna Brown

Sundries

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.

Nestflix | ‘Welcome to Nestflix: The platform for your favorite nested films and shows.’

Wired | Love this format: ‘How would you explain machine learning to a child? A teen? A college student? A grad student? An expert?’

@GaryLegum | ‘What if we’re all misreading this photo and the lobsterwoman is so powerful that she’s actually summoning a lobster out of the ocean into the boat.’

@dinosofos | ‘Absolutely terrifying footage from a ferry carrying passengers escaping the shores of Lake Evia in Greece.’

@CriticalStress_ | ‘An absolutely stunning view of the unusual agricultural fields on Lanzarote’

@wattenberg | ‘…when a hurricane is heading to landfall, the map goes ominously, unreadably dark. Technical bug, emotional feature.’

@AlexSelbyB | ‘Visual representation of the variable efficiency of my oven. A heatmap, if you will’