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 2013.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Kenan Davis | I love bump charts and love football visualisation. Here is a football bump chart for the 2012/13 premier league season.
Quadrigram | Here’s a similar concept, using Quadrigram, to analyse the evolution of the Champions League teams
New York Times | ‘Across U.S. Companies, Tax Rates Vary Greatly’ – a look at what S.&P. 500 companies paid in corporate income taxes
Bolides | One of the entries to Visualizing.org’s meteor strikes contest, this from Carlo Zapponi
Washington Post | ‘A Swing of Beauty’ long-form visualisation/digital article about Bryce Harper’s swing
CM Summit | ‘Behind the banner’ looking at the adtech ecosystem
Furia | ‘an algorithmically-generated map of the musical genre-space… positioned by code and data, adjusted for legibility’
Visual News | Amazing paper sculptures designed to map historical events
Visual Loop | Portfolio of the week: Adolfo Arranz
Tech Crunch | ‘Google Visualizes Massive Changes To The Face Of The Earth With New Timelapse Project’
20minutos | The collection of graphics work for Spanish newspaper, ’20 minutos’
South China Morning Post | Rain patterns in Hong Kong
La Sombra Del Asno | Infographic about Mount Everest, 60 years on from Hillary/Norgay’s ascent
Chronicle | Major players in the MOOC universe
Simon Rogers | To mark Simon’s departure from the Guardian, his colleagues compiled an infographic of his life
New York Times | Video graphic exploring how ‘Rafael Nadal’s style of play and his two-handed backhand put a lot of stress on his injured left knee.’
Guardian | Ocean scene: before and after overfishing
Radical Cartography | Exploring the topography of ‘flat’ cities to add more ‘drama’
Fathom | Updated slopegraph for Baseball’s Salary vs. Performance analysis
Stamen | Facebook Beatquake: What millions of sound waves traveling through Facebook look like
Berkeley | Info247, Spring 2013 student project showcase
Twitter | The geography of tweets – ‘Give every Twitter user a brush and they will paint you the world — if they geotag their Tweets.’
Words and Votes | ‘Rhetoric doesn’t always match the record. Explore what Congressional leaders and your local representatives are saying and doing to make our communities safer.’
Well-Formed Data | Stadtbilder — mapping the digital shape of cities
Glimmer | TV Show Rankings – choose from one of 145 popular TV shows to see episode ranking by GEOS members
Articles
The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse and interviews
FastCo Design | Article about ‘How Infographics Are Changing Congress’ featuring Jon Schwabish
Wired | A cloudless atlas: MapBox is making world’s ‘most beautiful map’
BBC | Five interpretations of the ‘Global Flight-Path’ map by Michael Markieta
Spatial.ly | …and a good follow up piece from James Cheshire about why the map is so great
Visually | Nick Diakopoulos discusses ‘Data Visualization for Tablets and Touch Screens’
Data Remixed | Ben discusses ideas for presenting connected scatterplots (he also astutely quotes from my book so gains an added gold star)
Data Viz Blog | Michael Sandberg begins a multi-part series dissecting in incredible detail the Minard/Napoleon graphic
Density Design | Giorgia Lupi interviews Alberto Cairo
FastCo Design | ‘Designers: Learn To Code! Here’s How To Start’
HBR | Nick Diakopoulos’ second entry this month! This time an interesting article titled ‘Don’t read infographics when you’re feeling anxious’ (may need registration to read)
PJIM | ‘Visual Alpha-Beta-Gamma: Rudiments of Visual Design for Data Explorers’
Guardian | ‘Hans Rosling: the man who’s making data cool’
Peachpit | ‘Heroes of Visualization: John Snow, H.W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem’
Fathom | How much geography can we do without?
Sheila Pontis | How to add rigour to Design Practice
CJR | Less is more with mobile visualizations
Michael Babwahsingh | Wayfinding through the visualization space
FT | Misinformation can be beautiful too
Medium | Nine patterns among great UX teams
FastCo Labs | Scoops and Software: How The New York Times Tells Stories With Data
ExcelCharts | Jorge considers a series of ‘Strange L-shaped trends’
Computerworld | Tech hotshots: The rise of the dataviz expert
James Shelley | Discussing the concept of ‘the expert’
Source | Super breakdown of Amanda Cox’s keynote at OpenVis Conference
Xocas | ‘Yet Another Post About What ‘Snow Fall’ Means for Long-Form Multimedia’
Perceptual Edge | ‘Beware the Straw Man’ – Stephen crtiques some of the ideas raised by Amanda Cox in a recent HBR article and by Nathan Yau in a recent blog post
Column Five Media | Developing a Visual Language: USA Today’s Graphics Rebranded
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Juice Analytics | ’30 days to storytelling’ a collection/series of resources around the subject of storytelling.
YouTube | Irene Ros’ presentation at Fluent 2013 about the “ABC of Data Visualization”
YouTube | Short animated video on the history of typography
Vimeo | Bret Victor’s Stanford presentation titled ‘Drawing Dynamic Visualizations’
Worry Dream | …and here are some further notes presented by Bret
Post Graphics | Behind the scenes look at how the WaPo made the ‘Bryce Harper’s swing’ project
Charts’n’things | Narrative of the work that went into the NYT’s live tracker of how much money major league teams were paying to players on the disabled list
Journalism | ‘How the Guardian built multimedia interactive Firestorm’ (project linked below)
Datavisualization.ch | ‘How We Visualized Life After Fukushima’
Brainpickings | Ira Glass on the Secret of Success in Creative Work, Animated in Kinetic Typography
ExcelCharts | Making Excel maps without VBA
Klevr | Interview with ‘Storytelling with Data’s Cole Nussbaumer
Tapestry | Jonathan Corum’s keynote presentation
ProPublica | Design Principles for News Apps & Graphics
FILWD | A collection of Visualization Papers at CHI 2013
Silicon Angle | Top Skills for Data Visualization : Tableau Q&A with Jock Mackinlay
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Dictionary of Numbers | ‘Dictionary of Numbers is an award-winning Google Chrome extension that tries to make sense of numbers you encounter on the web by giving you a description of that number in human terms.’
Whitehouse | ‘Executive Order — Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information’
Bocoup | Introducing d3.chart – A Framework for Creating Reusable Charts with d3.js
Software Studies | Software Takes Command – new book by Lev Manovich
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
FastCo Design | Kickstarting: A $30 Optical Tool For Drawing With Camera-Like Accuracy
Eager Pies | Probably the best ‘how-to’ guide of the month…
Guardian | Continuing the recent trend, a long-form digital story from Guardian about the Tasmanian bushfire
Grantland | …and another, this time arguably less visualisation-y but I love the cohesion of the story with the map at the top
GeoGuessr | Guess geography. Don’t get addicted.
Recurring Developments | An interactive visualisation of running jokes in Arrested Development
Mashable | See Every Ray Harryhausen Creature in One Video
Wired | Text or email a smell to a friend with the Scentee iPhone adapter
Tim Bouckley | Introducing EIDOS – ‘Eidos consists of two pieces of experimental equipment that give you superhuman sight and hearing… enhances the way we see motion’ (interesting possible applications)