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 December 2015.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Pata | ‘The Racial map of Brasil’
Roads to Rome | ‘There is a saying that all roads lead to Rome. We set out on 3.375.746 journeys to check if that was really true.’
Tulp Interactive | ‘Snowflake: A unique snowflake that is generated based on text. Text can be customized and the snowflake can be shared as seasonal greeting with friends and family.’
Stamen | ‘Connecting environmental stories worldwide’
The Guardian | ‘”A tortured heap of towers”: the London skyline of tomorrow’
City Lab | ‘A Historical Atlas of America, Built for the 21st Century’
Maarten Lambrechts | Rather than take up hundreds of lines of 2015 reviews, let me save your time and mine by just pointing to Maarten Lambrecht’s excellent ‘List of visualisation lists’ collecting all the best collections and compilations of visualsiation work in 2015
ABC News | As you might imagine, quite a few Star Wars related stuff… first up, ‘Star Wars: every scene from I-VI charted’
Bloomberg | ‘Star Wars: The Force Accounted’
The Guardian | ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens – your interactive cheat sheet’
Tableau Public | ‘Star Words: Every line spoken by the Rebels and the Empire from the Star Wars original trilogy’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘The Drake Effect Is Real, But The Nicki Effect Is Bigger’
FT | ‘The fastest and longest goalscoring streaks in world football’
Washington Post | ‘The math of mass shootings’
The Oregonian | ‘Gun sellers in the United States’
TheUpshot | Super randomised headings…’Gun homicides in [COUNTRY] are about as common as deaths from [DEATH] in the United States.’
The Guardian | ‘How well do you really know your country? Take our quiz’
Open Prescribing | ‘Explore England’s prescribing data’
The Royal Institution | ‘A Place Called Space: 24 unique looks at the human experience and cultural significance of space travel, through videos, articles, infographics and interactives.’
Goldilocks | ‘This is a view of the sky, showing all the known exoplanets (1,942 confirmed exoplanet discoveries d.d. October 9, 2015) and their host stars’
Wall Street Journal | ‘How Fed Rates Move Markets’
Flowing Data | ‘A Day in the Life of Americans’
National Review | Hmmm. ‘The only #climatechange chart you need to see’
QZ | ‘The most misleading charts of 2015, fixed’
Dear Data | ‘Week 52: A week of goodbyes’
New York Times | ‘Gun Sales Soar After Obama: Calls for New Restrictions’
New York Times | ‘What Happens When the Fed Raises Rates, In One Rube Goldberg Machine’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘What Would It Take To Turn States?’
QZ | ‘Where there are more women than men working in the US’
Washington Post | ‘Why people used to look so serious in photos but now have big smiles’
Morgenpost | ‘Wings of Desire – every day: We show when the sun was shining and how nice it compared to Hamburg was really like’
New York Times | ‘From the Graphics Archive: Mapping Katrina and Its Aftermath’
Polygraph | ‘This Is What Hip Hop’s Billboard Top 10 Sounded Like, Back In 1995’
Morgenpost | Live measurements of dust pollution during 2016 across sites in Germeny (I think…) ‘Alle Berliner Messstationen unter EU-Jahresgrenzwert’
New York Times | ‘Mapping Saturn’s Moons’
Gravy Anecdote | ‘Music listening trends: 2015. The death of the album?’
New York Times | ‘The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing’
Untangling Tennis | ‘A visual and data analytic exploration of success in tennis: Uncovering the relationship between performance and popularity.’
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
Poynter | ‘6 lessons academic research tells us about making data visualizations’
Webkid | ‘How interactive news and data journalism responded to the major events of 2015’
PolicyViz | Another super deep review by Jon ‘Looking Back to 2015 and Looking Forward to 2016’
Eager Eyes | ‘Memorability, Science, and The Value of Thinking Outside the Box’
Medium | ‘Next Steps for Data Visualization Research’
The Guardian | ‘Pixar co-founder warns virtual-reality moviemakers: ‘It’s not storytelling”
FiveThirtyEight | ‘The 2015 Data Awards: A very special ceremony, honoring the year’s most interesting people and stories from the world of data.’
Lisa Charlotte Rost | ‘The Line between Data Vis and Data Art’
Chartbeat | ‘The Most Engaging Stories of 2015 | Year in [Read] View’
Gizmodo | ‘Virtual Reality Lets You Live the News Instead of Reading It’
Perceptual Edge | ‘What Qualifies as Engagement?’
Medium | ‘Floor Charts on the Floor Screen’
Eater | ‘Why Is It So Hard to Make Great Food Infographics?’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, resources, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Ann K Emery | ‘When pie charts are ok (seriously)’
Chad Skelton | ‘In defence of data visualization rules’
Policy Viz | ‘Episode #27: Dear Data Wrap-Up’
interhacktives | ‘Lunch with the IHT: John Burn-Murdoch’
Graphitti | ‘Today I learned how to make gifs!’
Medium | ‘Introducing d3-scale: I’d like D3 to become the standard library of data visualization: not just a tool you use directly to visualize data by writing code, but also a suite of tools that underpin more powerful software.’
Github | ‘The Quartz guide to bad data’
Scientific American | ‘The Evolution of a Scientific American Infographic: Secret Life in Household Dust’
Data Remixed | ‘When Memorability Matters: Another Practitioner’s View’
Rstudio | ‘Data Visualization with ggplot2: Cheat Sheet’
The BMJ | ‘Will Stahl-Timmins: Almost impossible cancer spaghetti’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Information is Beautiful Awards | A full list of the winners from the 2015 awards night
RStudio | Announcing the release of ggplot2 2.0.0
Poly.ly | ‘Plotly.js Open-Source Announcement’
Yahoo | ‘Review: These Glasses for Colorblindness Really Work’
Squaire.js | ‘Square bin map library from The Wall Street Journal’
Tekja | ‘Tekja is a young and dynamic data visualisation company based in Fish Island Labs, London’ check out some nice portfolio pieces
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 | ‘Dear Architects: Sound Matters’
LinkedIn | ‘How Bad Design Wrecked Steve Harvey’s “Universe”.’
New Yorker | ‘Our favourite cartoons of 2015’
FastoCo Design | ‘Pantone’s “Gender-Blurring” Colors Of The Year Are… Pink And Blue!?’
Star Wars Street View | Last bit of Star Wars stuff…’Star Wars Street View’
Gates Notes | ‘The Top 6 Good-News Stories of 2015’
FastCo Create | ‘This Lego Color Chart Contains Every Color Lego That Exists’