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 January 2015.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Washington Post | ‘Barack Obama’s presidency has been remarkably steady — at least in his approval rating’
Postscapes | ‘Networked Art: 10 projects using real time data’
Visual Loop | Profile of the sensational portfolio of Jaime Serra
Jaime Serra | …and here’s one recent example. A visual diary of a year of coffee drinking using cup stains to quantify and cup shape to categorise
LSE Cities | ‘Urban Age Cities Compared: Where People Live’
Visual Loop | ‘100 print infographics of 2014 – pt I’
Gavi | Created by Jan Willem Tulp, ‘Every vaccine counts’
Quartz | ‘A story of drinkers, genocide and unborn girls’
WSJ | ‘The Data Mining of Emotions’
New York Times | ‘The Dawn Wall: El Capitan’s Most Unwelcoming Route’
FastCo Exist | ‘These Beautiful Maps Show How Much Of The U.S. Is Paved Over’
Airbnb | Terrific live map of airbnb check-ins and guests
Morgenpost | A journey down the M29 bus line through various social statistics
WSJ | More data investigation than visualisation but a really interesting look at the ‘coulda been contenders’ – films that should have been invited to the Oscars party.
WE Forum | ‘The Global Risks 2015 Interconnections Map: How are global risks interconnected?’
Bloomberg | ‘Scientific Proof that Americans are Completely Addicted to Trucks’
Onformative | Presenting the ‘Klarna Data Wall’
Spotify | “Every second a few people hit ‘play’ on the same spotify track” this animated map shows some selected moments of serendipity over a one hour period
CNN Money | Interactive chart showing how the ‘Millennial generation is bigger, more diverse than boomers’
Ars Technica | Interesting demonstration of small multiple word clouds. Believe me.
Bloomberg | ‘2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record’
BBC | ‘US blizzard: Charting the snow depth – using six dogs’
New York Times | ‘Can This Treatment Help Me? There’s a Statistic for That’
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
PBS | ‘My Crazy Wonderful Experimental Journalism Class’
Evergreen Data | ‘Numbers, Guts, & Culture: How Data Visualization Changes the Conversation’
DataRemixed | ‘Avoiding Data Pitfalls, Part 1: Gaps Between Data and Reality’…and
DataRemixed | ‘Avoiding Data Pitfalls, Part 2: Fooled by Small Samples’
Wired | ‘The rapidly disappearing business of design’
Analytics Magazine | Featuring a special on data visualization
Vis4 | ‘Look, Ma, No More Mercator Tiles’
Eager Eyes | ‘The State of Information Visualization, 2015’
Guardian | ‘Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything’
PolicyViz | Jon shares an audio chat with Cole Nussbaumer where they discuss, amongst other things, zero baselines
Source | ‘What if the data visualization is actually people?’ by Sarah Slobin
5W Blog | ‘Working with ProPublica’
Washington Post | ‘Humpback whales have communities, culture, and now, sheet music’
After The Flood | ‘London Squared Map: Making the city easier to read’
FastCo Design | ‘Infographic: Who Murdered Whom In “Sons Of Anarchy”‘
National Geographic | ‘100 Years of National Geographic Maps: The Art and Science of Where’
Source | ‘Connecting with the dots: Jake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots’
YouTube | ‘Hans Rosling on global income disparity (and snowballs) – Newsnight’
Eager Eyes | Robert has started a series of posts that present seminal visualisation papers
FastCo Design | Article profiling The Upshot ‘Where The New York Times Is Redesigning News’
Vis4 | ‘When It’s Ok to Use Word Clouds’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Online Journalism Blog | ‘FAQ: Teaching data journalism’
Harvard | Paper: ‘Perception, Cognition, and Effectiveness of Visualizations with Applications in Science and Engineering’, by Michelle Borkin
Ordnance Survey | A really useful summary of ‘Cartographic Design Principles’
Story Bench | ‘Under the hood: Ebola coverage at the New York Times Graphics Department’
O’Reilly | Video: ‘Effective Data Visualization: From Design Fundamentals to Big Data Techniques’ by Jeff Heer (some bits free, others cost)
O’Reilly | ‘Lessons from next-generation data wrangling tools’
New York Times | Behind the scenes description of the work that went into the NYT’s ‘The Dawn Wall: El Capitan’s Most Unwelcoming Route’ project
Tableau | ‘Decision trees, flow diagrams, sankeys in Tableau… here is a solution’
MBTAViz | Video of ‘How we built MBTAViz’
PJIM | Volume VII, Issue 1 of the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
O’Reilly | New book: ‘Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture’ by DJ Patil and Hilary Mason
Truth & Beauty | New book: ‘New challenges for Data Design’, edited by David Bihanic
Atlas of Design | New book: the 2014 Edition of ‘the Atlas of Design’
Visual.ONS | New site: A nice, newly decorated home for the collection of visualisation output from the Office for National Statistics
Open Culture | ‘The Public Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use’
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 | ‘What If Nike Sold Oranges And Apple Sold iMilk?’
Abbreviated Y Axis | Jessica Schillinger set up a tumblr to curate “without comment (mostly), graphs and charts with truncated Y-axes, good or bad. Just seemed like something that had to be done.”
ThingLink | Possibly useful tool, “With ThingLink you can easily annotate image and video content with notes and rich media links.”
WSJ | ‘Charlie Hebdo Attack: Cartoonists Respond’
Washington Post | ‘How to win Wheel of Fortune’
Guardian | ‘Second comings: the artists who found success the long way round’
Studio 360 | ‘Existential progress bars’
Guardian | ‘Winter suns, anyone? Nasa produces vintage travel posters for newly discovered planets’
Washington Post | ‘Quiz: Can you name a city just by looking at its streets?’
Medium | Jer Thorp’s appeal for ‘An Artist in Every Library’
Brand New | Interesting article about the much talked about Sonos logo
FastCo Design | ‘All 236 “Friends” Episodes In One Poster’