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 October 2013.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Flowing Data | Incredible piece of work to create a single graphic comparing the size of starships from science fiction
Washington Post | How the shutdown affects departments
Enigma | Now ended, but during October this was a great, live dashboard of the facts and figures relating to the US government shutdown
YouTube | 10 seconds of extreme trading in blackberry
Rasagy | Visualizing 500 Days of Summer
Stamen | Visualisations for Jawbone as presented at TED 2013 using TED attendees’ data
Digital Attack Map | ‘Digital Attack Map is a live data visualization of DDoS attacks around the globe, built through a collaboration between Google Ideas and Arbor Networks. ‘
Flowing Data | Maritime traffic in the Baltic Sea, animated
Sport England | Interactive to look at the participation numbers around different sports
Health Plan | Explore your neighborhood health profile (in LA)
New York Times | ‘The Cancer Divide: Uganda Fights Stigma and Poverty to Take On Breast Cancer’
New York Times | ‘Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live’
BBC News | Women gain as gender gap ‘narrows’
QlikView | Nice demonstration of data StoryTelling feature in QlikView11, using the data visualisation census data
New York Times | A Short History of the High Rise
Guardian | ‘The UK tops the 2013 open data index but how do other countries compare?’
EyeSeeData | Football Player Transfers: ‘133 years of transfer data into a 60 second history lesson’
SCMP | Some fantastic infographic work from the SCMP team during October, browse through the series
UK Data Explorer Blog | ‘Experimental interactive Census maps of English wards’
Boston Globe | ‘NBA salary cap game: Make your own team’
Guardian | Interactive map: the history of music in Manchester
Stamen | Surging seas mapping project
Flightaware | Tracking and visualising the misery associated with traveling by air
RTI | Introducing the ‘Synthetic Microdata Household Viewer’ – ‘How does the human population organize itself across the landscape? How do age, income, race, and household size vary in cities?’
Guardian | Three degrees of separation: breaking down the NSA’s ‘hops’ surveillance method
Cooper Center | More pointillistic mapping beauty, this time to show a single dot for each vote in the US presidential election, coloured by party
Guardian | Australia in Numbers: What is the safest time to drive?
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
Knight Foundation | Jake Porway’s post about ‘Big data for the greater good’
Poynter | Continuing the recent trend of great articles about colour ‘Why rainbow colors aren’t the best option for data visualizations’
Masters of Media | ‘The Not-So-Functional Art: Putting Information Visualisation Back Into Context’
Eager Eyes | Introducing Tableau’s upcoming new feature ‘Story Points’
Peltier Tech Blog | Excel charting dos and don’ts
Vincos | A Gephi generated view of the Italian Twittersphere
Eager Eyes | Glowing review from Robert for Isabel Meirelles’ ‘Design for Information’ book
A List Apart | Flat UI and Forms
Journalism | The Times building ‘suite of tools’ for multimedia stories
Tableau | Great set of articles for the October Design Month series
New Yorker | Why Abraham Lincoln loved infographics
qunb | Good Ol’ Excel Is The Ultimate Data Visualization Tool (In Most Cases)
UX Magazine | Useful article about designing for mobile – ‘Six mobile myths’
Second Story | Write up from the Shape of Story event ‘an interactive screening to spark conversation’
Fast Company | ‘The New York Times fights ‘Snow Fall’ fatigue with more Snow Falls – and it’s working’
BBC | ‘BBC plans to help get the nation coding’
Eager Eyes | Report from IEEE VIS 2013 in Atlanta, GA
FastCo Design | Why our brains love curvy architecture
DataHero | Interesting take on the ongoing debate of ‘Visualisation vs Infographic’
Dominikus | Big Pictures in the Small: Visualizations on Mobile Devices
FastCo Design | The Science Of A Great Subway Map
Usesthis | ‘What do people use to get stuff done? Featuring Hadley Wickham’
The Functional Art | ‘Storytelling, journalism, visualization, and science: A discussion in Nature Methods’
DataVizBlog | Critiquing Data Visualizations
Wired | NBA Superstar Chris Bosh: Here’s Why You Should Learn to Code
ATH Creative | Amanda Hobbs’ reflections on a year of freelancing
Perceptual Edge | ‘Chart Junk: A Magnet for Misguided Research’ – Review of the Research Study “What Makes a Visualization Memorable?”
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Visually | ‘Graph Visualization 101’ – series of posts on the basics of graph visualization by Sébastien Heymann in collaboration with Bénédicte Le Grand
IEEE VIS | Full collection of IEES VIS 2013 Papers
SportsVis | What’s the score?
The 1st Workshop on Sports Data Visualization, papers from IEEE VIS 2013
CiteVis | Visualizing Citations among InfoVis Conference Papers
Web Design Depot | A simple typographic trick to increase text readability by up to 30%
Wired | 13 of the Year’s Best Infographics
O’Reilly | Video of Scott Murray’s talk ‘Getting Started with Interactive Data Visualizations’
Mulin Blog | ‘A quick guide on web scraping: Why and how’
Slideshare | Visualizing ‘Big’ data slide deck from Sean Kandel & Jeffrey Heer (Trifacta)
Interaction Design | Online course: ‘Information Visualization: Getting Dashboards Right’ (at time of publishing the course had started but you can still join)
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Density Design | Introducing RAW, ‘The missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics’
Amazon | New book: ‘Presenting Data Effectively’ by Stephanie Evergreen
Visual Loop | Really useful collection of visualisation blogs and their recent posts
Community Resources | Newly discovered site: ‘Community Resources is an online collection of references compiled by researchers in the field of visualization (including scientific visualization, information visualization and visual analytics)’
Thumbs Up Viz | The antidote to WTFViz! ‘Thumbs Up Viz is a collection of elegant, efficient, and (above all) effective data visualization.’
Charles Apple | Boston Globe’s Javier Zarracina moving to the Los Angeles Times
MapBox | Eric Fischer joins the MapBox team
VisualizingImpact | Newly discovered site: ‘We are a collective of techies, designers, researchers, information architects and storytellers working with organizations to transform complex information into compelling insights’
accidental aRt | Newly discovered site: ‘When data visualization goes beautifully wrong.
VizCandy | Newly discovered site: ‘at play in the world of visual analytics with Tableau and Excel’
IDL | Newly discovered site: Formerly the Standard Vis Group, now the UW Interactive Data Lab
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
xkcd | Tall infographics
Nielsen Norman Group | iOS 7 User-Experience Appraisal
BBC News | How did van Gogh find colour
FastCo Create | ‘This map shows what every country leads the world in and it’s not entirely flattering’
Kickstarter | Waveform – bleep, techno and rave silkscreen prints
FastCo Design | Must be an application for this in visualisation – ‘A Scratch-N-Sniff Book For Budding Wine Snobs’
FastCo Design | Artists Aim To Rebrand The Slums Of Rio, With A Wave Of Audacious Color
Noisli | ‘Noisli is a fantastic and good looking background noise and color generator ideal for working and relaxing.’