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 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Bloomberg Politics | ‘A Really Small Slice of Americans Get to Decide Who Will Rule the Senate’
FastCo Design | ‘An Interactive Map Of Manhattan’s Mega Urban Expansion’
The Guardian | ‘Bike accidents mapped – five years of cycling crashes in Melbourne’
Faces of Fracking | ‘California’s Getting Fracked: Everything oil companies aren’t telling you about the extent of fracking in California, and what it means for your food, water, and health.’
Big Think | ’40 Ways to Carve Up England’
Die Zeit | ‘Charting Germany: Tracking a nation’s changes
Die Zeit | ‘The Divided Country’ – more great work from Paul and the team exploring the changes (or lack of) across German since reunification 25 years ago
Climaps | ‘This website presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS… an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate’
Infovis Postdam | Visualisation of a collection of over 7 million cultural objects from the German Digital library (in German)
FT | Interesting mapping to show the digital divide in the US and how it ‘exacerbates inequality’
Think Visible | ‘Equal population mapper: a perspective on density’
Animated Data | Interactive visualisation of the careers of F1 drivers based on their achievements at different ages
The Variable Tree | ‘Anatomy of an Emerging Knowledge Network: The Zapnito Graph Vizualized’
Bloomberg | ‘Why Governors in Tight Races Should Be Talking Jobs, Jobs, Jobs’
Jerome Cukier | Jerome returns to public action with some visual exploration into the ‘slopes of San Francisco’
SCMP | Infographic about ‘China’s high-speed rail vision’
Christian Warnow | Interactive Sankey diagram portraying the ‘German lobbying complex’
The Guardian | ‘Exposing the ‘independent’ campaign ads that aren’t, really’
New York Times | ‘How Likely Is It That Birth Control Could Let You Down?’
FT | ‘Surface tension in tennis’ – analysing the different performance levels of top tennis players across the different playing surfaces
New York Times | ‘The Most Detailed Maps You’ll See From the Midterm Elections’
PMCruz | A brilliantly bonkers ‘ecosystem of Corporate Politicians in Portugal 1975-2013’
SCMP | Long form graphically rich article: ‘Tigers and Flies: How two years of graft probes have shaken China’s political elite’
FastCo Design | ‘The Daily Routines Of 26 Of History’s Most Creative Minds’
Urban Layers | ‘Urban Layers: Explore the structure of Manhattan’s urban fabric’
New York Times | ‘Watch 10,000 League of Legends Games in 30 Seconds’
Pro Publica | ‘Where Congress Stands on Guns’
World Pop | Series of flow maps linked to the topic of ebola – ‘The WorldPop project provides detailed and open access population distribution datasets built using transparent approaches’
Tableau Public | ‘The changing language of freedom’
Chartball | ‘Who are the NFL’s most active players?’
Reuters Graphics | ‘114 Years of Nobel Laureates’
Washington Post | ‘If you’re on the beach, this map shows you what’s across the ocean’
Souvenir | ‘Souvenir is an app for visualizing leisure travel.’
Quartz | ‘The world above us: This is every active satellite orbiting Earth’
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
Rev Square | ‘RevSquare’s infographics team, Samuel and Juan Velasco, share the secrets behind transforming complex data into easy-to-understand visuals.’
New York Times | ‘A Golden Age of Design: Thanks to a convergence of creativity, technology and big money, the heyday of the field may finally be upon us.’
AIGA | ‘Nigel Holmes on using humour to illustrate data that tells a story’
Simply Stats | ‘An interactive visualization to teach about the curse of dimensionality’
BBC News | ‘Ebola: Can big data analytics help contain its spread?’
Wired | ‘The Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design’ – interview with Cindy Brewer
Fast Company | ‘Design thinking.. what is that?’
FastCo Design | …but before you get too excited by the possibilities, here’s ‘The Trouble With Design Thinking’
Ghostweather R&D | Great roundup of ‘Recent Text Analytics and Vis Work’
Visual.ly | ‘How Audio Can Help Communicate Time Data’
FastCo Design | ‘Inside The Design Of Norway’s Beautiful New Banknotes’
Quartz | …and here are some of the designs that were rejected
Graphitti | Article discussing the challenges, solutions and middle-ground of designing interactive visualisations to work mobile
ADC Global | Discussing the reactions to a very ‘white’ line up of winners of ADC’s Young Guns 12 competition
Creative Bloq | ‘The importance of data in design’
The Functional Art | ‘Don’t call yourself an infographics designer if what you do is data decoration’
Fast Company | ‘The Guardian Rolls Out A Redesign, With Input From Thousands Of Readers’
Under the Raedar | ‘How we read maps and dataviz – new research needed?’
Fast Company | ‘Two Designers’ Quest To Create The Magazine “The Beautiful Game” Deserves’
Wired | ‘This Guy’s Quest to Track Every Shot in the NBA Changed Basketball Forever’
Medium | ‘Whale Song Explained: Humpbacks synchronize their music across oceans, and there’s sheet music to prove it.’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Shaded Relief | ‘Shaded Relief: Ideas and Techniques about Relief Presentation on Maps’
Simon Rogers | Simon serves up ‘The five Ws of data journalism’
Under the Raedar | Tutorial for ‘Flow mapping with QGIS’
Nature Graphics | Breaking down the design challenge and solution for the ‘Top 100 Papers’ graphic
Practical Typography | Wonderful resource for learning more about typography
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Eager Eyes | Bravo to Robert on 8 years of Eagereyes!
Journalism.co.uk | ‘Guardian forms new editorial teams to enhance digital output’
The Information Capital | New book: ‘The Information Capital’, by James Cheshire – ‘One hundred portraits of an old city in a very new way’
Juice Analytics | New book: ‘Data Fluency’, by Zach Gemignani and Chris Gemignani
Information is Beautiful | New book: ‘Knowledge is Beautiful’, by David McCandless
Alex Singleton | New book: ‘Transport Map Book’, by Alex Singleton – ‘The Transport Map Books are available for each local authority district in England and present a series of maps related to commuting behaviour’
Amazon | Another new book! ‘Understanding the World: The Atlas of Infographics’, by Sandra Rendgen and Julius Wiedemann
DataCracy | New site: ‘DataCracy: A social network to quickly share data driven arguments. Through simple plots.’