It was great to recently have the chance to curate a deep-dive discussion about a key topic in data visualisation on the Data Visualisation Society slack channel. My topic of choice was surrounding the issue of how one would recognise and pursue elegance in a data visualisation.
After a short delay, I’ve finally managed to find the time necessary to go through the multiple threads of rich discussions that emerged from this exercise and have formulated some sense of a summary post. It has now been published on the DVS Medium publication ‘Nightingale’. Many thanks to Duncan Geere and Jason Forrest for their editing and publishing assistance.
I’m delighted to share news that my new book, the second edition of ‘Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design’, is printed, officially published and now available to order!
The aim of this book is to help people to become better visual communicators of data through the optimisation of creative, analytical and contextual decision-making. To find out more, visit my dedicated book page.
The first edition was published in Summer 2016 which means the last writing I did for that was around December 2015. Although the fundamental intent and structure of the first edition remain in this second edition, three years elapsing in the visualisation field offers plenty of scope to find new ways to express ideas, to identify and edit some sections of ragged language, and also to refresh some of the examples images to represent contemporary references. It also gives me reason to revisit the companion digital resources (that are accessible to all).
You can order the book now through Sage Publishing in many different regions. It is also available on Amazon (UK) from 20th August and will be available on Amazon and other usual retailers/bookshops across other European regions shortly after this date. Outside of Europe, people in Australia and New Zealand can get a copy through Footprint from early September. In North America, the book will be available from around 15th October on the Sage link above and also Amazon.com. There is a similar release date in the USA through Barnes and Noble.
Unless you are a committed completist collector of books, if you already have the first edition you may not need to invest in this new edition as well. If you are buying this text for the first time, then this is the best edition to go for.
Please note the hardback copies are intended for libraries whereby they need to be a little more physically robust to protect the condition of the book for long term usage. Far fewer hardback copies are printed which means that the individual unit cost is higher than would normally be found with the higher volume print runs of the paperback version.
I’d like to thank Sage for giving me the opportunity to update this text and to all readers who have already bought the first edition and those who may invest in this second edition.
After a disrupted 2019, I’m finally now getting round to look forwards again. A key component of that involves considering my prospective schedule of data visualisation training events: how many, what type, when and, crucially, where.
Though I already have a number of events lined up for the rest of 2019, with a new book coming out next month and lots of plans for enhancing my training offering, I’m keen to continue growth across each of these headline statistics.
PUBLIC TRAINING: I have been offering public training since 2011 and have delivered events all over the world. My choice of training location is always influenced by the levels of interest expressed by people requesting their preferred city to be added to the schedule. So if would like to encourage me to add your location to my upcoming schedule, please complete the form on the ‘Training Request‘ or send me an email. Once sufficient levels of interest are expressed for a certain location I will make every effort to schedule an event.
PRIVATE/CORPORATE TRAINING: Delivering private training events for organisations has been the most dominant training type across my working calendar for most of the past two years, in particular. Data visualisation training can be delivered on-site for client organisations in the most convenient corporate locations and at the most convenient times. If you would like to explore options for arranging a session for your team or wider group of colleagues, once again, please complete the form on the ‘Training Request‘ tab or email me with information about your potential requirements and we’ll discuss the opportunities.
HOSTED EVENTS: Hosted events are training workshops where a partner organisation may host and organise the training event, delivered by me, but with attendance open to public delegates or maybe select groups of attendees (for example, people who have registered to attend an associated conference event). Typically, an arrangement will be made with the organiser to agree a flat rate fee or a proportional share of the revenue generated. If you would like to consider me to assist with such training the contact methods are as above.
CURRENT SCHEDULE: Here is the current schedule of public events taking place through to the end of 2019.
| ONLINE | From 23 SEP 2019 | Next 3-monthly cohort | |
| LONDON (2 days) | 8-9 OCT 2019 | 6 places left | |
| ROME (2 days) | 30-31 OCT 2019 | Organised by ‘Technology Transfer’ | |
| UTRECHT (2 days) | 27-28 NOV 2019 | Organised by ‘Graphic Hunters’ | |
| LONDON (2 days) | 2-3 DEC 2019 | Coming soon… |
To mark each mid-year and end-of-year milestone I take a reflective glance over the previous 6-month period in the data visualisation field and compile a collection of some of the most significant developments. These are the main projects, events, new sites, trends, personalities and general observations that have struck me as being important to help further the development of this field or are things I simply liked a great deal. Here’s the full compilation of all my collections.
In February I published a collection for the second 6 months of 2018 and now I’d like to reflect on the first 6 months of 2019. I look forward to hearing from you with suggestions for the developments you believe have been most significant.
And so, as ever, in no particular order…
The Data Visualization Society was launched in February as a new community for this field to offer the space and the place to help people learn from one another, perhaps in a collaborative and conversational way that is not already covered by the platforms in which most content is published (Twitter, blogs). Founded by Amy Cesal, Elijah Meeks and Mollie Pettit, its mission is to ‘foster a community where every member benefits from resources that support growth, refinement, and expansion of data visualization knowledge regardless of expertise level’. In its first few months the DVS has gone from strenth-to-strength, with an almost-overwhelmingly vibrant Slack workspace comprising over 6000 members and a dedicated Medium platform ‘Nightingale‘.
This is a stunning piece of visual representation but about a deeply sad and personal subject matter (visit the full size version for true impact). Created by Sonja Kuijpers to shine a light on the tragedy of depression and suicide, the abstract landscape creates a canvas portraying the 1917 different people who committed suicide in the Netherlands during the year 2017. Each method of suicide is represented by different visual elements, varied further to depict the age groups. Sonja’s courage in presenting the background to this work is remarkable and inspiring in equal measure, and the companion design process narrative is a must read in its own right.
Over the past 12 months, under the various stewardship roles of Phil Kenny (former Head of Design), Alex Selby-Boothroyd (Head of Data Journalism) and Graham Douglas (Head of Graphics), the quantity and quality of the print graphics and digital interactives output from the data journalist team at The Economist has risen to an exceptionally high level. They should be included in any conversation about where the finest visualisation work is being produced from, and I’ve been really impressed with some of their particularly novel representaiton approaches (example 1, example 2, example 3). One of my favourite articles of the year related to their critical reflections about the previous graphical mistakes they have made. Also check out this recent insightful Reddit AMA with Evan Hensleigh and Martín González.
The bar chart race – an animated bar chart showing changing values and ranks of categories over time – burst on to the scene (I think) around February of this year with the above race showing the changing nature of dominant global brands (as tweeted here). Since then you can’t have failed to encounter spin off applications popping up across social media (not just data vis social media). John Burn-Murdoch was the man behind one of the most viral with his version about the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500, as viewed by over 2.7m people (and check out his astute observations about their power/limits). John published his code via Observable and the folks at Flourish studio then took this on and integrated it as a new feature in their visualisation tool. I’ve seen them used on sports and news coverage on TV since then, reinforcing their mainstream appeal.
With the urgency and focus on the climate change emergency (*hopefully*) starting to increase, I feel it is coinciding with and/or being partly influenced by an era of excellent visualisation work about this and related subjects from subject experts and graphics professionals alike. Just a few of my favourites works from Alexander Radtke (as shown above), Axios, The Guardian, SCMP, anything by Ed Hawkins, anything also by Neil Kaye, Washington Post, Robert Rohde, Reuters, and the New York Times to name but a few. A special mention also to Ken Black for his incredible body of self-initiated exploration work in to the subject of climate change, and a pointer towards a pair of interesting articles/papers ‘Exploring the Design Space of Engaging Climate Change Visualizations for Public Audiences‘ and ‘The Climate Spiral Demonstrates the Power of Sharing Creative Ideas‘.
This might seem a minor and rather small item to include in this list but I think it is significant that an organisation like the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) has taken this stance of ‘saying what they see’ in chart titles. Navigating the demands for impartiality can be a difficult matter for such organisations (I’d throw the BBC into the same mix) and so this more confident approach should be seen as a benchmark for others to emulate. As Frank Donnarumma describes in this explanation piece “Currently, most of the chart titles used across the ONS are purely statistical, signposting the data within the chart and nothing more… Good titles have been shown to make messages in charts more memorable, so going forward, we want our chart titles to be more descriptive. We want to communicate with clarity and speed”.
I really like this new series of video explainers produced by the FT and starring Federica Cocco and (second mention!) John Burn-Murdoch. In each video, they “dig into the numbers behind divisive issues” using hand-drawn visuals to drive the discussion. You can watch the full series of videos here.
Nicholas has been one of my favourite visualisation designers for a few years now and this is another masterpiece from his production line. Maybe THE masterpiece. It is a beautifully intricate digital reproduction and enhancement of Elizabeth Twining’s celebrated two-volume catalog from 1868 “Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants”. You can browse the hand-drawn illustrations, order posters, and read the best-in-class ‘making of‘ article.
In the space of just a few days in June came news of two major acquisitions in the visualisation/analytics technology space. Firstly, based on my radar rather than chronology, Tableau announced it was being bought by Salesforce for $15.7bn. This followed news of Google acquiring Looker for $2.6bn. (I mention this latter story reached me after the Tableau news because – and I’m still surprised by this – I had never previously heard of Looker). What impact this will have on the visualisation tool marketplace, on the existing users of each platform and of the direction of the field at large remains to be seen but clearly this is a major milestone in the field’s timeline given both the size of the investments and the names of the companies involved (I have clearly heard of Google…).
Led by Julius Tröger, and with a team packed-full of talent, the visual journalism and interactive departments at Zeit Online (the digital sister to the Die Zeit weekly newspaper) are producing some of the very best visualisation work (anywhere, not just in Europe). Pieces like ‘Europe from Left to Right‘ (shown above), ‘The Millions Who Left Us‘ and ‘Split Country‘ (all translated titles) are just some of the recent examples that demonstrate their visual and editorial skills, with their particularly strong flair for spatial analysis.
Here are the other highlights from the first half of 2019 that deserve a special mention:
Paths to Congress | Developed for the New York Times by Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma, this is an amazing depiction of the academic and career paths that the members of the House of Representatives took to Congress. Also check out the glorious print version and a super podcast episode with the creators.
The British-Irish Dialect Quiz | Just as its American-dialect predecessor did in late 2013, this project went super viral in February – not surprisingly as us Brits and Irish are somewhat obsessed by our dialect tribes.
Equal Earth | This is an important new mapping projection that offers physical maps and digital resources based on equal-area “continents and oceans which are shown at their true sizes relative to each other”.
Amber Thomas | I love Amber’s work and you should too, check out her portfolio on The Pudding
Rachel Dottle | I have also loved Rachel’s work at FiveThirtyEight, but she has now moved on to a data visualisation role at IBM Data Science & AI so hopefully that won’t deny us publicly witnessing her talent
Chartball NBA #gamecharts | A personal favourite of mine as a sports fan, I love these animated charts that perfectly capture the ebb-and-flow of a basketball games scoring patterns. The static versions are also fantastic.
Shelly Tan’s dedication | To capture the data to feed ‘An illustrated guide
to all 6,887 deaths in ‘Game of Thrones’ takes herculean frame-by-frame effort. Hats off to Shelly for this!
ConText | There were many really good visualisations about this topic but this piece by Fathom, “Understanding the Mueller Report through word association” was one of my favourites of the year.
Brussels.
A lovely Melting-Pot. | This data visualisation is an ‘essay exploring Brussels and its people’, developed by Karim Douieb, and contains some stunning visual elements.
In this series I am looking at different contextual, editorial, analytical, or design challenges encountered when working on data visualisation tasks. Each will be framed around a specific ‘everyday’ challenge with five possible methods, ideas or observations presented. Focusing on just five is deliberately arbitrary and non-exhaustive: just enough to provide some different ideas but not enough to pretend to be definitive.
Many visualisations use colours to represent data values, either to show quantitative scales or categorical classifications. One of the most common colour metaphors used in visual displays involves the use of a red-green colour scheme, sometimes known as “RAG” or “traffic light” colours. These colours are used to convey notions of green = ‘good’ or ‘above average’ and red = ‘bad’ or ‘below average’ in some cultures, and the reverse in others. Such colour connotations are long-established and widely used, especially in financial or corporate contexts, but whilst they provide a certain immediacy in their meaning for many viewers, around 4.5% of the population are colour-blind (8% of men) with the red-green colour deficiency “Deuteranopia” being the most common form. This means a significant proportion of viewers may not be able to perceive important such visual encodings.
The five suggestions below offer just some of the practical ways to make your colour palettes as accessible as possible to as high a proportion of viewers possible. It should be noted, though, that other forms of colour blindness and, more broadly, visual impairment are not necessarily addressed by these suggestions.
This first alternative offers a particularly good option if you want to maintain the connotation that the equivalent of the red hue is the ‘bad’ side of the spectrum.
Here are the HEX and RGB codes for this colour scheme…
The pink-red through to lime-green colour scheme is one of the more commonly used alternatives to the standard red and green hues used by default. In this example it is applied to represent the degrees of above or below an average rather than an indication of badness or goodness. This is a connotation that the pinker end of the spectrum certainly manages to imply perhaps more so than the default red hue would.
Here are the HEX and RGB codes for this colour scheme…
This colour-blind friendly diverging scheme inverts the connotation of the red colour to make it red-hot-good, which then diverges towards a blue colour which conveys blue-cold-bad.
Here are the HEX and RGB codes for this colour scheme…
Rather than changing colours, in some contexts you may choose to leave the default red and green hues and double-up your representation with a symbol encoding to also show the same classification of good-bad (this is known as redundant encoding). For example, you might use up and down arrows or include the plus and minus signs.
Another option, if the format permits, is to consider offering an interactive toggle to let users switch between different colour palettes to suit their needs. In this example there is are two colour settings for colour-blind unfriendly (default) and friendly (option).
Need more help? Check out Colorbrewer 2.0 to generate colour-blind friendly palettes, the Chrome plug-in NoCoffee to test the colour accessibility (in many ways) of websites, and the desktop widget Color Oracle to simulate the colour accessibility of your current display. Also, read this piece about Datawrapper’s integrated colour-blind accessibility checking feature.
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 June 2019.
Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.
NZZ | ‘My city has a fever – as the summer in Swiss cities has become hotter’ [Translated from German]
Studio Terp | ‘A view on despair’
New York Times | ‘Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot’
Tabletop Whale | ‘An Atlas of Space’
The Pudding | ‘A People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.’
Senseable City Lab | ‘How visually distinct are our cities?’
@axismaps | Nice thread of interactive mapping techniques
@rebbowler | ‘The average user touches their phone 2,617 times a day’
Dueling Data | ‘This visualization is a moving piece of data art. It is a clock whose points radiate from the hour on the clock face. The viz changes as the hour changes.’
Zeit Online | ‘The Millions Who Left’
@carlbaker | ‘3 examples of a new unconventional map… a cartogram/population-based map’
The Pudding | ‘Best Year in Music: A Journey through every Billboard top 5 hit to find music’s greatest era’
Reuters | ‘Measuring the masses: The contentious issue of crowd counting in Hong Kong’
@jburnmurdoch | ‘New data video: Concern about inequality is growing, but by most measures inequality has been flat in recent years.’
The Guardian | ‘Museum art collections are very male and very white’
@jonni_walker | ‘To help promote #SeaTurtleWeek I created a data viz…’
New York Times | ‘The Roots of Big Tech Run Disturbingly Deep’
Tableau Public | ‘How much do I really use my favorite crutch word? An analysis of the um’s I used in my TC18 talk’
New York Times | ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of How Protesters Have Flooded Hong Kong Streets’
The Economist | ‘Calls to rein in the tech titans are getting louder’
National Geographic | ‘See the drastic toll climate change is taking on our oceans’
Reuters | ‘How India-Pakistan tensions have disrupted air travel’
Katie Lewis | ‘I invent and implement systems in order to visualize the transformation of materials over time.’
WSJ | ‘The Biggest Shot in NBA History’
Bloomberg | ‘More Refugees Are Seeking Shelter. The U.S. Is Taking Fewer’
Washington Post | ‘After a biblical spring, this is the week that could break the Corn Belt’
@jburnmurdoch | ‘NEW: a data-driven look at how women are slowly getting more lead roles in big British and American TV shows’
Five Thirty Eight | ‘Which 2020 Candidates Have The Most In Common … On Twitter?’
BMJ | ‘The gender pay gap in England’s NHS’
FT | ‘Timeline: No end in sight for US-China trade war’
The Guardian | ‘Which 2020 Democrats are powering their campaigns on fossil fuel donations?’
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
American Meteorological Society | ‘The Climate Spiral Demonstrates the Power of Sharing Creative Ideas’
Nightingale | ‘Choose Your Own Beyoncé’
Medium | ‘Data Visualization in the Age of Communism’
Policy Viz | Typically thoughtful piece by Jon about ‘DataViz Critique’
Tableau | ‘Design secrets we can learn from historic visualizations’
Medium | ‘Disinformation in reporting migration and how we can overcome it.’
Datawrapper | ‘Greenland’s ice is melting, but without an OMG moment’ – careful but astute critique from Lisa
Medium | ‘Explaining A Single Isotype: Creating Simplicity From Complexity (Part 1)’
After The Flood | ‘State of the Art of Sports Data Visualisation: Introduction’
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
@wiederkehra | A nice accompanying ‘how we made it’ thread for the NZZ piece above
@maartenzam | ‘I came up with 14 data (visualisation) story patterns…’
Semantic Scholar | Paper: ‘Linking and Layout: Exploring the Integration of Text and Visualization in Storytelling’ by Qiyu Zhi, Alvitta Ottley, and Ronald A. Metoyer
Google Sheets | A growing collection of links and references to data visualisation style guidelines
Medium | ‘Six Principles for Designing Any Chart: An introduction to Google’s new data visualization guidelines’
Simply Statistics | ‘Teaching R to New Users – From tapply to the Tidyverse’
John Grimwade | ‘Tools revisited – Analog infographic equipment’
Eager Eyes | ‘Two Short Papers on Part-to-Whole Charts at EuroVis’
Voilà | ‘How we visualized world inequality’
Medium | ‘What to Expect in the Data Visualization Engineer Job Interviews’
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Quartz | ‘The multibillion-dollar sales of Tableau and Looker are a coming of age for data visualization’
Amazon | New Book:’Storytelling with Data: Let’s Practice!’ by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’
London Datastore | ‘City Intelligence Data Design Guidelines’
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
Amber Thomas | ‘Dear Career Switchers: You are not a Failure’
New Yorker | ‘How to Draw a Horse’
New York Times | ‘108 Women’s World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything’
Boing Boing | ‘Grocer designed embarrassing plastic bags to shame shoppers into bringing reusable ones’
@rainmaker1973 | ‘Globe making: how the World was made in 1955’
@so_bad_ass | ‘My 18 year old son sent me this with the message “found the perfect road trip for you”‘
FiveThirtyEight | All the posts from the “Science Question From A Toddler” series
The Encode conference is taking place in London on 19th and 20th September. As I previously posted, this is a brand new two-day conference that aims to ‘bring the creative community together to debate, share and explore the future of data-driven stories’.
I know from speaking with the organisers, that one of the key aims of this conference is diversity, in both the representation of speakers and attendees as well as the topics being discussed. I’m fortunate to be both a speaker and attendee but my only positive contribution towards diversity is to be a Yorkshireman with green eyes, which doesn’t really count. I therefore want to try contribute, in a small way, to widening access to this event, inspired by a gesture made by Rasagy Sharma.
If you know of anyone potentially interested in attending from a typically-under-represented community in data visualisation, and/or perhaps somebody who doesn’t have the means to justify the outlay to attend a conference event, let me know via email and I’ll fund the registration costs for one attendee. If I receive multiple suggestions I’ll do a random pick, rather than make a subjective judgment of who ‘deserves it most’, which is not for me to determine.
I’ll collate suggestions up to and including Wednesday 31st July and then the person attending has plenty of time to make arrangements.
(ps. I tweeted about this two-days ago and have not received any suggestions yet, so if you’re hesitating because you think there might too many others coming forward, don’t!)
** UPDATE ** I received multiple requests/suggestions for who could attend the conference and so, to fairly determine who received the funded ticket, I did a random draw to select a name. I used a highly non-technical method based on writing all names on post-it notes, screwing them up and then shuffling them about in an empty cup. The first name that I drew from the cup, and the person who receives the free ticket is Éléonore Mayola.
I also decided that I wanted to make a further smaller gesture to two more people to whom I will send a copy of my new book when it is published. The second name drawn was Denis Owor and the third name was Andrea Barry.
I’m sorry I couldn’t help out everybody who expressed an interest but thank you to everyone who engaged with this process
It was a pleasure to join Max Gadney to participate in the first episode of his After the Flood podcast. Based on our respective experiences working in different capacities with clients from the sports industry, in this episode we discussed the current trends of data visualisation in sports: within the sport, about the sport, on TV and on second screen devices.
Thanks to Max for inviting me on his first show. I wish him a long and glorious podcasting career!
In this series I am looking at different contextual, editorial, analytical, or design challenges encountered when working on data visualisation tasks. Each will be framed around a specific ‘everyday’ challenge with five possible methods, ideas or observations presented. Focusing on just five is deliberately arbitrary and non-exhaustive: just enough to provide some different ideas but not enough to pretend to be definitive.
Any data visualisation used for communicating understanding to others will need to have some element of a title. That may be a project title at the front of a report, at the top of a graphic or web page, or simply above a chart. We often resort, by default, to using the title to describe to the reader what analysis has been conducted eg. “Total staff numbers broken down by department, July 2019”. Such an approach is often entirely suitable given the contextual circumstances of a given task. However, though this is of course useful information to share *somewhere*, I often find this approach to be somewhat mechanical and misses an opportunity to communicate something more using this unique piece of apparatus. After all, a title is usually amongst the most prominently displayed and immediately seen features of any work, regardless of format.
The five suggestions below offer some alternative ways to think about using this prominent piece of real estate. When you need to or can do something more with a title than just describe what’s plotted, these approaches may help to better inform or charm your audience into engaging with your work.
This type of title approach takes the responsibility to say something. Depending on what the main insights are from the work, you might use this title space to reveal a key finding, a core conclusion or a summary observation from the visuals that follow. Read more about how this approach has now been adopted, where relevant, by the ONS.
Questions are the fuel behind any good and worthwhile visualisation. A good way to align your audiences expectations and interests in your work is to present the core curiosity your work has pursued, in question form, with the visuals that follow aiming to support the answering of that curiosity.
‘Artistic’ in this context means a short and punchy, but perhaps somewhat enigmatic, main title, a style you might find associated with a work of art, but often necessarily supplemented with a subtitle offering a more descriptive project background.
With web-based visualisations, there is scope to become more creative with your titling, perhaps adding some level of interaction to allow the user to customise it or, as in the example below, when you can’t decide whether to focus on the glass being half-full or half-empty, do both.
When the content of your title is something that is explicitly data-based, there are some further creative approaches that integrate titles with chart displays, either overlaid with a background device, like the example below, or through the inclusion of micro charts within the title sentence structure (like sparklines).
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 2019.
Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.
Zeit Online | ‘Europe from Left to Right’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Where Democrats And Republicans Live In Your City’
The Guardian | ‘The power switch: tracking Britain’s record coal-free run’
@huprice | ‘I designed my dress to be a ‘sign’ too. It’s global temperature data.’
National Geographic | ‘We’ll Have What They’re Having’
SCMP | ‘How Bruce Lee and street fighting in Hong Kong helped create MMA’
@billshander | ‘A #dataviz of the dot com boom. One year (12 issues) of @wired magazine. Year 2000 on the left, 2015 on the right.’
Economist | ‘China is surprisingly carbon-efficient—but still the world’s biggest emitter’
@flantz | ‘Feels like a watershed moment for the new form of the “interactive essay”.’ – fantastic thread collection of different works in this genre
Reuters | ‘Going gray: The world’s population is getting older. Japan is on the forefront of this demographic trend that will affect Germany, China and Italy in coming years.’
observablehq | ‘Animated flow map of commuters in the Netherlands in 2016’
2019 vote EU | ‘2019 vote EU is an online tool that allows you to explore the opinions of over 250 political parties from 28 EU member states on 22 policy statements for the 2019 European Elections.’
@GwilymLockwood | ‘This is the Premier League over time. The top 6-7 teams are getting stronger, and everybody else is getting weaker. ‘
Financial Times | ‘Why Liverpool and Manchester City have blown away football rivals’
National Geographic | ‘The Pacific’s fiery ring’
Jared Wilber | ‘The Permutation Test: A Visual Explanation of Statistical Testing’
Financial Times | ‘Pollution: the race to clean up the shipping industry’
The Guardian | ‘Premier League endgame: the data behind a historic title race’
@rarohde | ‘Animated diagram of the Earth’s Carbon Cycle and how it has changed over time.’
@DataToViz | ‘Early prototypes of reviziting the receipt, one piece of a larger question I want explore: how can viz be integrated into everyday experiences?’
Pitch Interactive | ‘The Mueller Report: A Word Frequency Analysis’
Trails of Wind | ‘The architecture of airport runways’
The Pudding | ‘Women’s issues within political party platforms’
Tableau Public | ‘100 Years of Platypus Sightings in Tasmania’
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
It’s Nice That | ‘“If it’s about farts, draw a butt for god’s sakes”: Mona Chalabi tells us how to illustrate data’
Nightingale | ‘Wedding Data Viz: How We Designed for Feelings’
Datawrapper | ‘What to consider when creating tables: Dos & don’ts of table design’
Medium | ‘Nadieh Bremer, the Data Explorer: Numbers Are Much More Rational than Humans’
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Nightingale | ‘How We’ve Learned Data Viz, and Why You May Want To Do It Differently’
@DataRemixed | ‘Here’s a 20th century #dataviz pioneer you may not have heard about (I didn’t until today) – Mary Eleanor Spear’
Data Stories | ‘Episode 140 | Data Visualization Society’
@LacePadilla | ‘Ever wonder ‘why’ exactly rainbow colormaps are bad? In our EuroVis paper, we provide empirical evidence that they perceptually discretize continuous data.’
@moritz_stefaner | ‘Observation: None of the most iconic climate data visualizations… seem to have come from information design or #dataviz experts.’
Cochrane Library | Paper: ‘Using alternative statistical formats for presenting risks and risk reductions’
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Bio Render | New tool: ‘Create Professional Science Figures in Minutes ‘
@giorgialupi | ‘Sharing a pretty big and shiny data point in my life: I am thrilled to announce that I am joining @pentagramdesign as a partner in the New York office!’
Longitude | ‘Longitude: A space for the map and data visualization community to converge, meet, and share.’
Datawrapper | ‘Our new Tables: responsive, with sparklines, bar charts and sticky rows’
Sandra Rendgen | ‘Preview: The History of Infographics, as seen by the experts (June 2019)’
Svift | New tool: ‘svift is an open visualisation tool to turn numbers into beautiful charts. It is easy, super fast and fun. Try our prototype now and let us know what you think.’
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
BBC | ‘How computing’s first ‘killer app’ changed everything’
@angt34 | ‘Great little detail on the new Luton Town jersey.’
CNN | ‘Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy’
@FraZaffarano | ‘Which version would you like to read?’
New York Times | ‘How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory’
@mikewhills | ‘One of my charts made it on to @haveigotnews!’
@sophiescott | ‘…we have a monthly podcast: I give him a scientific paper to read, and he sends me a poem to read and then we work out what art and science have in common’
Steve Haroz | ‘VSS Poster Bingo’
The Guardian | ‘Make your mark: the enduring joy of drawing’