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 March 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Malofiej22 | ‘The Spanish Chapter of the Society for New Design (SND) presents the final list of awarded entries from the 22nd Edition of the Malofiej Awards.’
Infosthetics | ‘CODE_n: Architectural-Scale Data Visualizations Shown at CeBit 2014’
Washington Post | ‘What happened to Flight 370?’
Washington Post | ‘The scale of the search for Flight MH370’
Lucas Infografia | Infographic from the South China Morning Post: ‘The War of the Worlds’
Vallandingham | ‘Want some more data visualization attempts, studies, and undertakings? Check out my new Experiments Section’
Earth Engine | ‘Explore different views into this global timelapse built from global, annual composites of Landsat satellite images. Watch change across the planet’s surface beginning as early as 1984.’
BBC Future | ‘Space Race: There are galaxies far, far away but how big is our own solar system?’
The Guardian | ‘As the Oscars age, so do the nominees’
Movehub | ‘Human Ooze Map: A Unique Look at Population Density’
Communication Arts | Showcasing the 38 winning projects from the ‘2014 Interactive Annual’ awards
Vizual Statistix | ‘On and off the street grid: relative distributions of road orientations’
Global Migration | ‘Explore new estimates of migration flows between and within regions for five-year periods, 1990 to 2010. Click on a region to discover flows country-by-country.’
New York Times | ‘The Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’
One Human Heartbeat | Jen Lowe put her heartbeat on the internet.
Twitter | Vintage graphic profiled in Scott Klein’s Malofiej talk
Rank and Filed | I don’t think I understand the subject particularly well but this is an interesting set of visualisations based on data collected by ‘Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’ by the ‘Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR)’ system
NATS | ‘A data visualisation showing a typical summer’s day of air traffic from last year.’
Atlas of Prejudice | ‘A book series with funny maps and essays about bigotry, paranoia, politics and prejudice by Yanko Tsvetkov, a leading international bigotry professional with a taste for unconventional historical studies.’
Global Rich List | Where are you on the global list?
New York Times | ‘Fewer Helmets, More Deaths’
Washington Post | ‘What made the mountain move?’
Visual Loop | ‘Portfolio of the Week – Misha Simakov: More examples of visual journalism from Russia’
SVDS | ‘History of Rock in 100 Songs’
usvsth3m | ‘The theme tune of your life is the song that was the US #1 on your ‘nth’ birthday’
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
Infogr8 | Infogr8’s Trend Report, best bits: “2014 – the year data visualisation turns from an afterthought to an essential starting point when informing an audience”
The Functional Art | ‘Infographics to explain, data visualizations to explore’
Drawing with Numbers | One for the Maths-heads amongst you: ‘L-System Fractals in Tableau’
Juice Analytics | ‘Three-and-a-half lessons learned from network diagrams’
FILWD | ‘Course Diary #3: Beyond Charts: Dynamic Visualization’
Malofiej22 | ‘The importance of appropriately range of data in a map’
Well-Formed Data | One of several posts published this month attempting to make sense and form some definitions around what stories and storytelling with data, here’s Moritz’s opening offering…
EagerEyes | Here’s Robert’s counter post to Moritz’s: ‘Stories Are Gateways Into Worlds’
Ghostweather R&D Blog | Lynn Cherny takes on the baton: ‘Implied Stories (and Data Vis)’
Periscopic | As does Dino of Periscopic: ‘A Framework for Talking About Data Narration’
Periscopic | ‘Talking Numbers at Visualized’: A recap of Kim Rees’ talk at Visualized where ‘Kim rocked the boat by calling for rethinking our mania with storytelling’
HP | ‘Earth Insights’ is a project that facilitates ‘scientists, environmental leaders and the wider public to see changes in ecology and biodiversity… from any location around the world’.
The Great Discontent | Long interview with Nicholas Felton
Source | ‘Newsroom analytics: A primer’
Bloomberg Business Week | ‘Sha Hwang, the Designer Hired to Make Obamacare a Beautiful Thing’
Cool Infographics | ‘The State of Infographics at SxSW 2014’
Scientific American | ‘The Data-Visualization Revolution: Virtual “telescopes” for big data make it possible to see through the deluge’
Source | From a year ago but I was reminded of it and its worth another share ‘The NYT’s Amanda Cox on Winning the Internet’ from OpenVisConf 2013
Gizmodo | ‘Let’s All Cool It With These Stupid Maps’
Graphicarto | …and as a counterpoint: ‘The Lost Art of Critical Map Reading’
The Guardian | ‘Infographics for children: what they can learn from data visualisations’
Wannabe Awesome Me | ‘Tapestry takeaways’
Tow Center | ‘Debugging the backlash to data journalism’
MIT News | ’emocratizing data visualization: Study examines use of ‘Exhibit’ tools in creating interactive data visualizations.’
Penn State | ‘Health researchers build bridges with Penn State’s new visualization wall’
Time | Long form article about the Google Timelapse project profiled above
Michael Babwahsingh | ‘Rational Thinking Made Tangible’
Metropop | Article to accompany the ‘Global Flow’ project above: ‘A circular data visualisation that makes international migration flow data more accessible.’
FastCo Labs | ‘How The Rise Of The “R” Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science’
NPR | ‘Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists?’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Chartsnthings | Process narrative behind the development of the New York Times’ 4th Down Bot, a news application that analyses NFL 4th down decisions in real time
Wolfram | ‘Harness the power of Mathematica to interactively visualize your data. This Wolfram Training course features a series of examples that show how to create a rich interface for exploring data in depth.’
Twitter | A seemingly small tweet from @stefpos turns into a fascinating discussion
Dominikus | Breaking down the challenge of creating the ‘selfiecity’ project
Ahoi | Paper: ‘A Visual Survey, Classification and Analysis of Data Visualizations at and of Events’
Evergreen Data | ‘Adding Standard Deviation to a Dataviz’
Slideshare | ‘Storyboarding csa2013 – Simple sketching for UX, user research & content strategy’
Peltier Tech | ‘Dot Plots in Microsoft Excel’
Source | ‘How we made the SOTU Twitter Visualisation: The Twitter #Interactive team breaks it down’
Knight Lab | ‘Don’t believe your eyes: Learning how to be critical with Alberto Cairo’
Data+Science | ‘A Graph Recreation in Tableau – Part 2: How To Build’
Bizweekgraphics | ‘Process post: how to make a giant oil spill map the hard way’
Kent.edu | Paper: ‘Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design’
Source | ‘Network diagrams are hard: NPR’s Alyson Hurt on the challenges of making good network diagrams’
13pt | ‘Two Little Ducks: A summary of Jonathan Corum’s talk at the 22nd Malofiej conference at the University of Navarra, Pamplona.’
Youtube | Videos from the Tapestry Conference 2014
UW Graphics Group | Paper: ‘Perception of Average Value in Multiclass Scatterplots’
Darkhorse Analytics | ‘Clear Off the Table’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Google Maps | Large gallery of maps on Google, with top rated and staff picks. If you’re name is Rob Simmon, I’d maybe skip over this one…
Visage | New tool: ‘Visage transforms the uninspired data in your reports into beautiful, branded visualizations that make your message more impactful—and make your work look good.’
Visual.ly | ‘Book Review: The Visual Organization by Phil Simon’
Fivethirtyeight | With the launch of FiveThirtyEight, here’s Nate Silver’s manifesto
The Guardian | ‘Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men’
Data Docs | New Tool: ‘Data Docs is a series of embeddable interactive video narratives, designed to render seamlessly on desktop and mobile (tablet and smartphone) devices.’
The Why Axis | ‘What Yahoo’s Latest Acquisition Means for Data Visualization’
Aesop Story Engine | New Tool: ‘Aesop Story Engine is a collection of thirteen unique components wrapped in a plugin that can be used to tell rich, interactive stories in (almost) any WordPress theme.’
Numberpicture | eBook from Number Picture, register to view
Variance Charts | New Tool: ‘Build powerful data visualizations for the web. Without writing JavaScript.’
NYPL | ‘Open Access Maps at NYPL’
Mapbox | ‘Zeit Online Launches Custom Maps’
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 | ‘Now You Can Buy Art Created From Your DNA’
Polygon | ‘Game designer cracks through myths about women in the games industry’
Glyphr Studio | ‘Glyphr Studio is a free, html5 based font editor.’
Gurusability | ‘Personas for video game development’
New Scientist | ‘Google Flu Trends gets it wrong three years running’
The Guardian | ‘How computer analysts took over at Britain’s top football club’
The Onion | ‘Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot’
Youtube | ‘LEDBIKE is a piece of modern art that displays real time data streamed from Barclays Cycle Hire Stations, from all across London.’
Vimeo | ‘Scraping Google Street View depth map and reconstructing it with openFrameworks’
Wired | ‘The Mathematical Formula for Beauty, Explained in Clever Pictures’
Wired | ‘Artists and makers, it’s time to be leaders’
Twitter | Correcting a Fox News graphic classic
FastCo Design | Putting a 14 year old in his place: ‘Why Garamond Won’t Save The Government $467 Million A Year’
Twitter | ‘Do you drink bottled water? Perhaps this will make you think twice!’
Upworthy | ‘What Uniques And Pageviews Leave Out (And Why We’re Measuring Attention Minutes Instead)’
Twitter | “The 8 types of bad creative critics”