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 July 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
The O-C-R | New project for the July issue of Popular Science “a 4-page, 3,460-word visualization which tells the story of NASA’s history in the agency’s own words”.
Flickr | New work from Accurat portraying ‘Great gaps in the world of art auctions’
Cloud Red | ‘An Interactive Visualization of NYC Street Trees’
Guardian | ‘Where do atheists live? Maps show the ‘godless’ cities of England and Wales’
New York Times | ‘A Rogue State Along Two Rivers: How ISIS Came to Control Large Portions of Syria and Iraq’
Applied Works | ‘Tour de France Climbs – Maps & Data Explorations’
Isoscope | ‘Isoscope is an interactive tool that creates aesthetic visuals about locations that are reachable by car in a chosen time from a chosen location’
Statistics.gov.uk | ‘How WELL do you know YOUR area?’ – great participative/interactive project to challenge your local know-how (UK)
Medium | Probably the most useful visualisation of the month: ‘Pack like a nerd: Optimizing underwear’
OECD | ‘Find, compare and share the latest OECD data: charts, maps, tables and related publications’
Business Week | Neat use of a Sankey Diagram to show quantitative and geographical flow
Flowing Data | Collection of projects that provide ‘Explorations of People Movements’
Guardian | An interactive language and swearing map of Australia
BBC Future | ‘Flight Risk: Exploring fatal commercial passenger plane incidents since 1993
Behance | ‘Accurat has been working for months side by side with the United Nations Development Programme in the design of all the data visualizations, charts and visual contents of the Human Development Report 2014’
YouTube | ‘Charting Culture – This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes’
SCMP | Infographic from Adolfo Arranz showing ‘The last days of rosewood’
NZZ | Plot showing how the Swiss population spends its day: on what activities, when and where
The Upshot | ‘How Birth Year Influences Political Views’
CartoDB | Nice demonstration of the use of CartoDB plotting geotagged tweets about the Tour de France Grand Depart in Yorkshire
National Geographic | ‘101 Years of Tour de France Globalization’
La Sombra Del Asno | Another piece from Adolfo Arranz detailing China’s manufacturing presence – ‘World Cup final, the winner is China’
April Zero | Beautifully designed site that tracks the life of Anand Sharma ‘For the past 171 days, I’ve been tracking everything about myself’
NYC Taxi | ‘NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life’ – “This visualization displays the data for one random NYC yellow taxi on a single day in 2013”
Bloomberg | ‘Graphic Language: The Curse of the CEO’
Washington Post | ‘Metro trains learn a new dance’
Guardian | ‘A global guide to the first world war – interactive documentary’
Chronicle | ‘Visualizing language usage in New York Times news coverage throughout its history’
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
FILWD | Enrico asks ‘How do you evaluate communication-oriented visualization?’
FastCo Design | ‘How To Draw Critical Design Insights From A Single Photograph’
Digital Publishing | Alan Smith discusses a new approach to visualising ONS data in the shape of the ‘How WELL do you know YOUR area?’ project
BBC News Magazine | ‘Small Data: Getting stuck on things or in things’
FastCo Design | ‘Watch: How Adobe Illustrator Changed Graphic Design’
Junk Charts | Kaiser discusses a big issue relating to the challenge of archiving in a digital age – ‘The unkind fate of data graphics in the media’
Fast Company | ‘New York Times Chief Data Scientist Chris Wiggins on the way we create and consume content now’
EagerEyes | ‘Putting Data into Context’ – “Raw numbers are easy to report and analyze, but without the proper context, they can be misleading.”
Visual.ly | Interview with three of Bloomberg Visual Data’s leading names
Well-Formed Data | Some notes from Moritz about the latest project he was involved in: The OECD Data Portal
Eager Eyes | ‘What is Data Journalism?’
FastCo Design | ’24 Of Design’s Most Important Principles, Animated’
Junk Charts | Excellent piece about ‘Interactivity as overhead’
Juice | Lovely article by James Lytle – ‘Visualization techniques we all knew at 4 years old’
HBR | ‘How to tell a great story’
Tableau | More storytelling-related content… this post for ‘Storytelling month’ by Matt Francis discusses ‘Telling tales with Tableau’
Storytelling with Data | … and his post by Cole Nussbaumer expresses the importance of three key words ‘Lead with Story’
Visualized | All the videos are up now from the 2014 Visualized conference
Earth Observatory | After 20 years Rob Simmon choses his favourite visualisations as he leaves NASA
FastCo Design | ‘Google Docs Gives Us A First Taste Of Google’s New Design Language’
Gestalten | ‘Juan Velasco Talks Infographics’ – “An interview about why we need data vizualisation, what it takes to create great infographics, and what it’s like to work at National Geographic”
PBS | ‘#EdShift Chat: Teaching Data Visualization’
ProPublica | ‘Podcast: What Design Can Do for Investigative Journalism’
FastCo Design | ‘UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry’
NiemanLab | ‘Alberto Cairo: Data journalism needs to up its own standards’
CIO Journal | ‘Germany’s 12th Man at the World Cup: Big Data’
Chez Voila | ’13 facts you didn’t know about the Minard map’
Visual.ly | ‘How to Easily Check Visualizations for Accuracy’
Markets For Good | ‘Making the World Look Simple’ – Nice article by Peter Grundy
MetroTrends Blog | ‘Maps need context’ article co-written by Jon Schwabish and Bryan Connor
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
FastCo Design | ‘Behind The Scenes Of Design Observer’s New Look’
Source | Design narrative from Chris Canipe about the WSJ’s app for visualisation the tendencies of top football penalty takers.
Isoscope | Superb design narrative for the above project
Data Remixed | ‘Six Principles of Communicating Data: A Checklist’ taken from Ben’s book ‘Communicating Data with Tableau’
Source | Project narrative about how The Texas Tribune made ‘Disappearing Rio Grande’
After The Flood | Lovely piece from Max detailing the team’s work on four videos for the BBC’s 100th Anniversary of the outbreak of WWI
Giorgia Lupi | ‘The shapes of my thoughts’ was such a wonderfully detailed and beautifully constructed talk given by Giorgia at Eyeo, here’s a written down version
Nature Methods | The latest ‘points of view’ article discusses sets and intersections (££)
Popular Science | ‘Behind The Scenes Of “The Whole Brilliant Enterprise”‘
Ann K Emery | ‘How to present data when you’re presenting: storyboarding your data visualizations in videos, webinars, presentations, and more’
Source | Project narrative about how The New York Times made ‘Spot the Ball’
SND | Infographic case study: ‘Boston Globe’s energetic interactive and print graphics’
Adventures in Viz | Rob’s presentation at the Tableau London Conference ‘Can Tableau Save You £100 million?’
Vimeo | ‘You are not a storyteller – Stefan Sagmeister @ FITC’
Visual Loop | ‘3D World Cup Dataviz Ball, by Times of Oman’ – “See how one of the most impressive World Cup visualizations was developed”
Source | Project narrative about how The New York Times made the excellent ‘Detroit Foreclosure’ interactive
Jessica Schillinger | The design narrative richness continues… ‘Sketches: Designing the Political Polarization Report’
Medium | ‘After the launch of Codecademy’s redesign, some people reached out to us wondering how we were able to embrace such a clean, minimal interface.’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Blopboard | ‘Blopboard is an innovative forum for asking questions and sharing opinions that provides members with an effective tool for organizing, customizing, and visualizing information in a new and dynamic way.’
Stamen | ‘Stamen has long aspired to make it easier for people everywhere to visualize data, particularly on and with maps. In our recent partnership with Tableau, we’ve helped to improve a tool that does just that’
Qlik | New tool: ‘Qlik Sense Desktop’ – Free self-service data visualisation and discovery that let your instincts lead the way
KeyLines | ‘Introducing KeyLines 2.0: Visualize your Dynamic Graphs’
Popular Science | ‘The Vizzies: Now Accepting Your Mind-Blowing Science And Engineering Visualizations’ (entries open to 30th Sep)
Kantar | ‘Kantar acquires data viz and interactive specialist Guardian Digital Agency
FT Data | All the Financial Times interactive data goodness, now in one place
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
With Google | ‘Smarty Pins’ a supremely addictive game based on the accuracy of your geographic knowledge
Slate | ‘Who Won the World Cup of Arm-Folding?’
The Upshot | ‘Quiz: Can You Tell What Makes a Good Tweet?’
News Nerds Firsts | Great collection of peoples’ first news graphic projects – “We all sucked once”
Moment Factory | ‘Wanting to showcase its charms, Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook commissioned Moment Factory to create Foresta Lumina, an illuminated night walk through the forest.’
Business Insider | ’16 Heatmaps That Reveal Exactly Where People Look’
It’s Nice That | ‘Luis Hernan’s work makes WiFi signals visible in astonishing images’
FastCo Design | ‘This Is The World’s Cumulative Average Handwriting’
It’s Nice That | ‘Onformative find faces in landscapes seen from above in Google Maps’
Stubbornella | ‘Sexist by design?’
Bored Panda | ‘Artist Recreates His Own Childhood Drawings 20+ Years Later’
Wired | ‘A Redesigned Parking Sign So Simple That You’ll Never Get Towed’
Twitter | ‘Guy tattoos the world map on his back, colors in every new country he visits’
Poynter | ‘Time.com’s bounce rate down 15 percentage points since adopting continuous scroll’
It’s Nice That | ‘An interview with Leftloft about their three-year rebranding of Inter Milan’