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 2018.
Visualisations & Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
SRF | ‘Roger Federer: 20 Years, 20 Titles’
Mapping Police Violence | ‘2017 Police Violence Report… collected data on over 1,100 killings by police in 2017.’
SCMP | ‘2017: the safest skies record’
SCMP | … and here’s a photo of the print version
Economics | ‘All the president’s tweets’
Pixel Mixer | ‘Anatomy of a Viz – The Level is in the Details’
Mike Vizneros | ‘A Chamber Divided: What We Can Learn By Using BioFabric Charts’
Taylor Baldwin | ‘Audiofabric’
Guardian | ‘Bussed out: How America moves its homeless’
Twitter | ‘A climate change cross stitch’
Making Data Visual | ‘Executable Examples for the Book “Making Data Visual” by Danyel Fisher & Miriah Meyer’
National Library of Scotland | ‘Explore Georeferenced Maps “Spy viewer” – View historic mapping within a spyglass circle’
Science Museum | ‘Exploring museum collections online: Some background reading’
Hello Sun App | ‘Explore the paths of the sun and moon across the different time zones of the world’
Guardian | ‘How the NHS winter beds crisis is hitting patient care’
FT | ‘Football’s finishing school: the Borussia Dortmund prodigy production line’ (scroll to bottom for some chart innovation goodness)
The Conversation | ‘Think your country is crowded? These maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe’
New York Times | ‘Is There Something Wrong with Democracy?’
WSJ | ‘Mind the Gap: The U.K.-EU Trade Challenge’
Datavis.Tech | ‘Moon Calendar 2018’
Twitter | ‘Because it’s hard to remember what’s normal weather in a changing climate, I built a bot that gives context to the current temperature.’
Points of Viz | A shared site/platform for Mark Edwards and Pablo Gomez to ‘showcase not only their work but also their journey, learning, developing and being a part of a growing community’
Twitter | ‘1960: In the future, we’ll be able to take a flying car to the moon | 2018… (best you go and find out yourself)’
Stats Maps n Pix | ‘The Most Densely Populated Square Kilometre in 39 European Countries’
Washington Post | ‘The grim scope of 2017’s California wildfire season is now clear. The danger’s not over’
Strava | ‘The heatmap shows ‘heat’ made by aggregated, public activities over the last two years.’
Five Thirty Eight | ‘Current congressional district boundaries’
Bloomberg | ‘How a Melting Arctic Changes Everything. Part I: The Bare Arctic’
Flowing Data | ‘The Demographics of Others’
The Pudding | ‘The differences in how CNN, MSNBC & FOX’
Axios | ‘The state of the space race in 1 chart’
Eric William Lin | ‘Pulsecheck: Is Orchestral Music Still a Living Art Form in 2017?’
Washington Post | ‘The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history. Trump is dismantling efforts to fight climate change.’
WSJ | ‘Trump Takes to Twitter Like Clockwork’
Politico | ‘The 285 people connected to the Russia probes’
National Geographic | ‘They Are Watching You—and Everything Else on the Planet’
Viz Wiz | ‘Visualizing 854 Strava Runs’
Pro Publica | ‘What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised?’
Datawrapper | ‘What the difference between mean and median tells us about income inequality’
SCMP | ‘Which movies do you like?’
Washington Post | ‘While the East coast is freezing, the West will be warmer than usual’
Articles
The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse, interviews and videos
Medium | ‘That graphic didn’t need to be a map’
FastCo Design | ’10 New Principles Of Good Design’
Eager Eyes | ‘A Smart Take on Election Maps’
Ann K Emery | ‘Data visualization resolutions for 2018’
Information Age | ‘Business leaders have a data literacy problem’
Medium | ‘Daily sketches in 2017’
Vive Report | ‘DeathTolls Experience: Virtual reality artist Ali Eslami is seeking to resensitize the general public to the reality behind the abstract statistics on the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Middle East’
FT | ‘Design secrets behind the FT’s best charts of the year’
Policy Viz | ‘F**k it, let’s use pie charts’
Tall Tales, Short Stories & Modest Musings | ‘Inclusive Illustration Research Part II: How Makeup Brands Handle Skin Tone (Better)’
Medium | Nice write-up about ‘OddityViz — a tribute to David Bowie with data’
Medium | ‘Think In Systems—Not In Goals’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, academic papers, development opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Visualizing Rights | ‘Visualizing Data for Human Rights Advocacy: A guidebook and workshop activity’
Twitter | ‘Data scientists: what is the most underrated / undervalued skill for a new data scientist?’
D3 Discovery | ‘Finding D3 plugins with ease.’
Data to the People | ‘Our data literacy competency framework, Databilities™, has been developed as a tool to measure and develop core data literacy skills and competencies.’
InVision | ‘Finding the best free fonts for numbers’
Laws of UX | ‘Laws of UX is a collection of the maxims and principles that designers can consider when building user interfaces’
Source | ‘How We Made Our School Segregation Interactive’
Benjamins | ‘Information Visualization: Special issue of Information Design Journal 23:1 (2017)’
Ben Clinkinbeard | ‘Learn D3.js in 5 days: Daily lessons delivered straight to your inbox’
Twitter | A neat illustration of the impact of unreasonable deadlines…
The Pudding | ‘The Making of the Weighted Pivot Scatter Plot’
FloydHub Blog | ‘Turning Design Mockups Into Code With Deep Learning’
Flowing Data | ‘Visualizing Incomplete and Missing Data’
Flowing Data | (and) ‘Visualizing the Uncertainty in Data’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new/new-to-me sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Mapbox | ‘CARTO moves to Mapbox to power location intelligence maps’
Washington Post | ‘Chiqui Esteban named Director of Graphics’
Guardian | ‘Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases’
Serial Mentor | ‘I’m very excited to announce my latest project, a book on data visualization’
GitHub | ‘Wee People – A typeface of people silhouettes, to make it easy to build web graphics featuring little people instead of dots.’
Twitter | ‘Starting a fortnightly ‘Data Stories Aotearoa’ newsletter in late Feb – focused on visualisation and data analysis related to NZ, along with resources for best practices and tools’
Information Plus Conference | Announcement about the Information+ conference 2018
Medium | ‘Luna, the visual way to create software’
No Other | New studio: ‘No Other: A design and technology firm dedicated to the climate change fight.’
Observable | ‘Observable is a better way to code.’
George Mason University | New Book: ‘Playfair: The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World’ by Bruce Berkowitz
The Chartist | A new blog by Lyndsey Pereira (Data visualisation editor, Bank of England) offering her ‘answers to the questions that pop up in everyday life.’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data/technology focus or just seem worthy of sharing
Guardian | ‘Floating 3D printing’ brings sci-fi-style projections closer’
Booooooom | ‘“Social Decay” by Artist Andrei Lacatusu’
Twitter | ‘Bernard Rudofsky found the average man of the 1940s carried roughly 78 buttons and 24 pockets’
Flowing Data | ‘Back to the Future, Abridged Chart Edition’
FT | ‘Britain’s Conservatives make a pitch for blue-collar workers’
Claire Hentschker | ‘Grand Theft Auto average series’
Guardian | ‘Hitting the heights: sport from above – in pictures’
Cal Tech | ‘It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle’ (love the chart on page 4)
Twitter | ‘Amazing world map of the dates national borders were first drawn ‘
New York Times | ‘Lella and Massimo Vignelli’s Minimalist Home’
Twitter | ‘The City of Los Angeles is now hiring Graphics Designer’
New York Times | ‘The Follower Factory’
Splasho | ‘The up-goer five text editor: Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words’