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 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
New York Times | ‘How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts’ – A highlight of the year from the NYT in the form of a scatter plot sparkline-multiple extravaganza
Noah Veltman | Animated heatmap showing the height vs. weight of NFL players over time
Egypt Building Collapses | Interactive audio (quite terrifying if you put the volume up) and visual timeline portraying the terrible number of Egyptian buildings collapsing
Flowing Data | Nathan profiles a tool that lets you move the poles of the Mercator projection to anywhere in the world
The Guardian | The first of many visualisations related to the World Cup, a super piece by the Guardian US asking ‘Do Golden Boot winners help win the World Cup?’
FastCo Exist | “This Map Shows How Far You Can Get In Traffic At Any Time Of Day”
New York Times | Huge interactive mosaic of Google Street View images showing ‘the 43,634 Properties in Detroit That Were on the Brink of Foreclosure This Year’
Spatial Information Design Lab | Report about visualisation work related to a NYC ‘Citi Bike Rebalancing Study’
New York Times | Gregor Aisch’s interactive network map that shows ‘The Clubs that Connect the World Cup’
Density Design Lab | ‘Seven Days of Carsharing: Exploring and visualizing the Enjoy carsharing service in Milan’
Dead Spin | ‘When Did Nazi Insults Spike On Twitter During USA-Germany?’
The Guardian | Tour de France 2014: Interactive stage and tactics guide
WSJ | ‘World Cup Players’ Penalty Kick Patterns’
National Geographic | ‘The Evolution of Alvin’ – A graphical timeline of the evolution of the deep-sea submersible as he (/it) celebrates a 50th birthday
Twitter | An alternative vision of the areas of land by type in London
The Guardian | ‘The Seven Digital Deadly Sins’ is an interactive project that profiles confessions of familiar faces relating their experiences of moral dilemmas in the digital world of today
Evogeneao | ‘The Evogeneao Tree of Life is a colorful genealogical family tree that helps students and the public understand evolution at a glance’
Globo Esporte | Wonderfully deep and multi-faceted interactive and animated narrative about the history of the World Cup
OECD | The OECD Regional Well-Being project
Darkhorse Analytics | ‘World Chat Clock helps you find a time to chat with people in different cities’
MobileVis | ‘Examples of data visualization usage on mobile devices and offer some observed best practices for building your mobile data visualization interfaces.’
GFK | ‘The European Political Twittersphere: Network of top users discussing the 2014 European Elections’
FastCo Design | ‘TrendViz Turns News Relevant To You Into Sleek Data Visualizations’
Twitter | “The number of workers who died in construction in the run up to recent sporting events” (warning: includes a naughty word)
New York Times | ‘2014 World Cup Special’ – Wonderful long form digital article with some terrific integrating of photo imagery and illustration
Twitter | From Amazing Maps: ‘60% of the population of Iceland lives here’
BoingBoing | …similar concept showing ‘The total area of solar panels it would take to power the world, Europe, and Germany’
Information Geographies | ‘Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute’ – “This project proposes a comprehensive mapping of contemporary geographies of knowledge”
Visual Loop | Special edition of World Cup infographics from Brazil
Visual Loop | …and a special edition of interactive World Cup projects
Slate | ‘Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans’
Tableau | ‘Tracking Ebola in Africa’ – Ramon Martinez has been all over this breaking story for weeks now, here’s some of his analysis
Pro Publica | Interactive small multiples show ‘Ambulances for Dialysis Patients on Rise’
WNYC | Interactive tool to explore the graduating rate histories of each NYC high school
The Guardian | Great tool used to track the remaining representation of players from different leagues at each stage of the World Cup
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
Mapping Complex Information | Sheila discusses Will Burtin’s significant legacy to the world of Information Design
Storytelling With Data | Cole presents a range of alternatives to the pie chart
Eager Eyes | Robert looks at some examples where the bars in the bar chart point downwards and make sense to do so
FiveThrityEight | Great series called “Hope the Numbers Help” by Mona Chalabi answering reader’s questions with data
Visual.ly | ‘Data vs. Editorial Judgment: The Danger of Chasing Numbers’
Periscopic | A great article discussing the objective of removing confusion from complexity
Smashing Magazine | ‘What Is The Most Underrated Word In Web Design?’ (answer: “affordance”)
ONS Digital Publishing | ‘Prototyping a platform for data storytelling’
Washington Post | ‘How one hackathon visualized ‘invisible data’ on the worldwide women’s empowerment problem’
NPR | ‘The NPR Visuals Team: How we work’
Pew Research Center | ‘Why we didn’t include the y-axis on our polarization chart’ – interesting discussion about design choices
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
AT&T Research | Collection of information visualisation papers from AT&T
Open Culture | If you happen to have 42 hours spare… ‘Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)’ (confession: I have not watched all of these)
do.minik.us | Project narrative for the new OECD Regional Well-Being project
YouTube | Josh Katz gives a talk at the NYC DataViz meetup discussing the NYT Dialect Map
UW Interactive Data Lab | Paper: ‘Authoring Narrative Visualizations with Ellipsis’ by Arvind Satyanarayan and Jeff Heer’
bost.ocks | ‘Visualizing Algorithms’ – “Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset.”
Data to Display | Discussion about different ways of constructing small multiples
O’Reilly | Video: Scott Murray’s ‘An Introduction to d3.js: From Scattered to Scatterplot’
Journal of Arts and Humanities | Paper: ‘Data Visualization and Infographics in Visual Communication Design Education at the Age of Information’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
DataRemixed | New book: ‘Communicating Data with Tableau’ by Ben Jones (Congrats Ben!)
Squish Logic | New tool: ‘Sankey Diagram’ – “Optimized for the visual iPad interface, Sankey Diagram allows users to visualize energy flows, economics, and more” (use promo code: KEPHHRXFFPMX)
Gareth Cook | New Book: ‘The Best American Infographics 2014’
Dataviz | New Site: ‘Dadaviz’, publishes a stream of different data visualisation projects
Search is over | ‘Exploring Cultural Collections with Visualization’ – International Workshop in conjunction with DL2014, 11-12 September 2014 in London
The Beauty of Health | “The Beauty of Health Data is a national exhibition and competition of health data visualizations hosted by the Foundation for Healthcare Innovation (FHI)” – here is an exhibition of the entries
GitHub | Elijah Meeks’ release of D3.js library that renders sketchy/handrawn rectangles and circles
Fathom | New Tool: ‘Mirador’ – “A tool for visual exploration of complex datasets which enables users to infer new hypotheses from the data and discover correlation patterns”
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
Who Pays Artists | A site that let’s you share and learn about the earning experiences of artists
Web Colour Data | Creates a colour profile for any website address you request
New York Times | A very addictive ‘spot the ball’ quiz based on goals from the World Cup
New York Times | Jennifer Daniel’s superbly bonkers ‘Battle Cries’ project playing the audio recordings of different football commentators saying “Goaallll!”
Animagraffs | Jacob O’Neal’s site showcasing his masterful animated gif designs of cutaways and mechanisms
xkcd | ‘Space, without the space’ – showing the solar system’s solid surfaces stitched together
FastCo Design | ‘Beautiful Stamps Reveal The Hidden Geometry Of The World Cup’
WSJ | A profile of how 3D printing works alongside a downloadable 3D-printable chart showing the sales of 3D printers. Is that clear?
WSJ | ‘100 legacies from World War I that continue to shape our lives today.’
YouTube | ‘Flight of the Conchords friendship graph’
New York Times | ‘As Robotics Advances, Worries of Killer Robots Rise’
22Words | ‘Designing the least user friendly products imaginable just for fun’
Phd Comics | ‘Your conference presentation’