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 May 2015.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Homicide Monitor | Some heavy stuff to start this month… ‘Exploring the distribution, dimensions and dynamics of international homicide around the world
Border Deaths | Continuing the uplifting theme… here’s a project that looks at Deaths at the Borders of Southern Europe
The Guardian | ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’
Washington Post | ‘Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide’
Washington Post | ‘Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war’
New York Times | ‘How ISIS Expands’
Flowing Data | When data and beer collide: ‘Brewing Multivariate Beer’
Twitter | “Here’s the weather map 70 years ago on #VEDay. Notice the dearth of observations over central Europe.”
5W Blog | ‘Behind the Art with James Gurney’
Chartball | Andrew releases a new set of ‘Baseball Chronology’ posters as featured in an exhibit at Baseball Hall of Fame in 2015
NZZ | ‘Telling the story of one of the greatest adventures in the history of Switzerland: the first ascent of the Matterhorn.’
New York Times | ‘Connecting the Dots Behind the 2016 Presidential Candidates’
Economist | Some nice Sankey diagram action to explain the decisions around the European asylum seeker deluge of applications
Zeit | A FatFonts-like approach here to show average ages across Germany
Info We Trust | Amazing work to visualise the ‘endangered safari’ in static and Tableau – with nice design narrative also
Every Noise | Audio samples of every music genre plotted on a massive scatterplot display
ProPublica | Photo essay and deep interactive map story about ‘Killing the Colorado’
Economist | ‘The tracks of arrears’ nice connected-tadpole-scatter-plot
ConceptViz | ‘Gallery of concept visualization’
NZ Herald | ‘Interactive: Where the Budget money goes’
Internaut Explorer | ‘Internaut Explorer is an experimental visualization of DMOZ, an open-content directory – this interactive map includes 3,809,444 pages’
Animated Data | ‘This is an interactive visualisation of results from Cole Henley’s 2014 Freelance Rates survey.’
Morgenpost | ‘New Berliners and native Berliners – who came, who went and who lives here today’
Fog On Water | ‘Rough experiments in visualising the 2015 New Zealand budget’
FT Data | ‘Shy Tories don’t tweet’
Soundcities | As it says on the tin, this project showcases difference audio soundbites from different parts of the cities of the world
New York Times | ‘The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares’
FT | ‘UK election results explained’
LA Times | ‘Ch-ch-changes: The evolving elements of pop music’
New York Times | ‘Your Contribution to the California Drought’
BuzzFeed | ‘The General Election Result In Maps. Lots Of Maps.’
Washington Post | Richard Johnson brings his incredible artistry to cover ‘The Tsarnaev trial: Drawing a line’
Washington Post | ‘Visualized: How the insane amount of rain in Texas could turn Rhode Island into a lake’
Well-Formed Data | ‘eyeo community visualizations’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying’ (Love the cumulative charts)
New York Times | ‘You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances’
Fallen | ‘The Fallen of World War II’
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
Medium | ‘A Design Education Manifesto’
PolicyViz | ‘Ban Bad Presenters, Not PowerPoint’
Medium | Jer Thorp argues the case for turning data into a verb
somethingaboutmaps | ‘Design is human’ article by Daniel Huffman describes how these words capture what doing good design is about
The Guardian | ‘Election aftermath: memos to the media for May 2020’
Data Remixed | Nice article by Ben contrasting doing data visualisation well with the classic concepts of writing well
Future NYT | ‘Review of Interactive Storytelling at the New York Times’
Sports Illustrated | ‘Soccer analytics revolution underway at Benham’s Brentford, Midtjylland’
Medium | Mike Monteiro talks about ‘The Chokehold of Calendars’
HBR | ‘The Persuasiveness of a Chart Depends on the Reader, Not Just the Chart’
Medium | ‘This is what it is like to be charged by a hippopotamus.’
Source | ‘Tracking Amtrak 188: How a quirky data source let us get ahead of the story’
Vizual Statistix | ‘Areal distortion of global map projections’
FastCo Design | ‘What Killed The Infographic?’ (Disagree with much of this piece but it triggered much discussion so needs to be acknowledged)
Medium | ‘Your Project Deserves a Good Death’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
InnoVis | ‘An exploratory study of data sketching for visual representation’
BBC Academy | Skills resource to learn about digital journalism
Tableau | ‘Introducing Lee Wilkinson, Tableau’s New VP of Statistics’
YoutTube | Video introduction to D3 from Curran Kelleher
Infragistics | Nice solution from Tim Brock to visually handle truncated y-axes in line charts
EagerEyes | ‘Paper: An Evaluation of the Impact of Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts’
Darkhorse Analytics | ‘Radar: More Evil Than Pie?’
Instructables | ‘Sketching & Drawing Lessons’
Maarten Lambrechts | ‘To the point: 7 reasons you should use dot graphs’
Jerome Cukier | ‘You may not need d3’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
WSJ | Incredibly sad news about the passing of WSJ Visuals Deputy Seth Hamblin
Chronographics | Newly discovered site: “Chronographics” featuring lots of innovative examples and discussions about time-related visual displays
The Guardian | ‘Google shuts off Map Maker after urinating robot ruins it for everybody’
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
New York Times | ‘Why Time Stands Still for Watchmakers’ (from 2008 but interesting, for me)
Boredpanda | ‘Artists cut raw food into 98 perfect cubes to make perfectionists hungry’
8by8 | ‘The art of commentary with BBC’s Nick Barnes’
Groupe Societe Generale | Customise your credit card with some self-designed digital art
Eye On Design | ‘Design History 101: How the Rolling Stone Logo Evolved from an Incredible Mistake’
The Playlist | ‘Ranking The 20 Greatest, Most Celebrated Long Takes’
SitComGeek | ‘How to Make a Bad Sitcom’
The Guardian | ‘UsVsTh3m’s demise shows challenge of making news for Facebook’
The Atlantic | ‘The Chinese Art of the Crowd’
Motherboard | ‘The Simple, Elegant Algorithm That Makes Google Maps Possible’
Medium | ‘The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car’
Mother Jones | ‘These Photos of the Vegas Fight and the Baltimore Protests Perfectly Sum Up Inequality in America’
Vox | ‘Why fewer computer graphics make for better movies’
xkcd | ‘The General Problem’