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 March 2016.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
BBC | ‘Life and death in Syria: Five years into war, what is left of the country?’
Andy Woodruff | ‘Beyond the sea’ – “What’s really across the ocean from you when you look straight out? It’s not always the place you think.”
McKinsey | ‘Breaking down the gender challenge’
CNN | ‘China: Beijing man photographs three years’ worth of smog from his window’
Behance | ‘Chirming: Visualising bird song’
Flag Stories | Comprehensive analysis of every conceivable attribute of the flags of the world
Muyueh | Visually exploring the assumption that ‘different languages have different ways to describe color.’
The Upshot | ‘Measuring Donald Trump’s Mammoth Advantage in Free Media’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Merrick Garland Is The Oldest Supreme Court Nominee Since Nixon Was President’
Proof Reader | ‘Most characteristic words in successful and unsuccessful whitehouse.gov petitions’
Onformative | ‘Porsche BlackBox online visualization of driving experience 2015’
Mike Kelley | “Wake Turbulence”, the cover page project as seen on PhotoViz – ‘Photographing every departure at LAX’s south complex’
National Geographic | ‘See Where Access to Clean Water Is Getting Better—and Worse’
Washington Post | ‘The end of the U.S. oil boom, told through one Texas company’s bust’
ProPublica | ‘Hell and high water’
WSJ | ‘The Delegate Simulator’
Bloomberg | ‘Virtual Gridlock: Relive the Agony of D.C.’s Metro Shutdown’
Washington Post | ‘Why flying is awful, explained using your sad, lonely apartment’
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
Nieman Lab | ‘A new data viz tool shows what stories are being undercovered in countries around the world’
Matthew D Harris | ‘Boxplot or not to boxplot: Woeful example’ – “How to visualize numerous distributions where quantiles are important and relative ranking matters?”
Medium | ‘Data visualisation: what’s next? The trends of data visualisation are forever shifting and changing as the data climate evolves at an ever faster pace.
FT | ‘Explore the changing tides of European footballing power’
Nieman Lab | ‘From “service desk” to standalone: How The New York Times’ graphics department has grown up’
Gestalten | ‘What is PhotoViz?’ – interview with co-editor Nick Felton about this fascinating new book
ProPublica | ‘Infographics in the Time of Cholera’
Markets for Good | ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Data Visualization for Good’
Medium | ‘Process and Progress: A Practitioner’s Perspective on the How, What and Why of Data Visualization’
Redheaded Step Data | ‘Color Innovation: This post imbues the importance of innovation with color in data visualization’
Medium | ‘That one free tool’
Juicebox | ‘The Future of Dashboards’
Nieman Lab | ‘The island of knowledge and the shoreline of wonder: Using data visualization to prompt exploration’
Medium | ‘The Myths of UX Design/ Product Design/Whatever They Call It This Week’
Prototypr | ‘Why Charting The Journey Is Just As Important As Charting The Data: Designing data visualizations for maximum impact’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, resources, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
You Tube | Collection of videos from the Tapestry Conference 2016
You Tube | Collection of videos from the IRE/NICAR Conference 2016
Data Bender | Tableau tutorial for adding a very useful feature – ’45 degree reference line with dynamic axes’
Flowing Data | ‘Comparing ggplot2 and R Base Graphics: I look at differences in a side-by-side, from a practitioner’s perspective.’
PolicyViz | Episode #36: Xaquín González Veira
Viz Ninja | An interesting organisational perspective on establishing a visualisation capability, here focusing on ‘How to Build a Tableau Support Team’
Webkid | ‘How we created an interactive map with MapboxGL’
ProPublica | ‘How We Made Hell and High Water’
GitHub | Archi Tse’s talk at Malofiej 24 ‘Why We Are Doing Fewer Interactives’
Chrys Wu | Collection of Slides, Links & Tutorials from NICAR 2016
O’Reilly | ‘Programming for Designers: Learn to express your ideas in code with p5 and JavaScript’
Atchai | ‘The best web-based data visualisation tools’
Randal Olson | ‘The correct way to use pie charts’
Eager Eyes | Pie charts never drop from the radar… ‘Ye Olde Pie Chart Debate’
Visual Loop | ‘What’s Really Happening’, by Janelle Hall – describing an informational graphic poster describing a typical female college student’s lifestyle
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Above Chart | New site from Scott Klein, ‘The Above Chart Manifesto’ looking at some of the pioneering but forgotten history of data journalism
Twitter | ‘A structural shift? Yes, moving to printed pages with visualisations composed entirely in #d3…’
SandDance | From Microsoft Research, ‘by using easy-to-understand views, a touch-based interface, and animated transitions between views, SandDance helps you find insights about your data’
The Lisa Project | Lisa Rost, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at NPR in Washington, is writing one blog post every day: “how do I judge my input and output? What did I learn today? And what questions still remain”
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
One Perfect Shot | ‘The cinematography of MR. ROBOT has re-written the rules for how to shoot episodic television. ‘
Boing Boing | ’25 GIFs that explain how things work’
New York Times | ‘A Short Puzzle to Test Your Memory’
MobilECG | The brilliant ‘MobilECG Business Card’
WSJ | ‘Classic New York Streetscapes, Then and Now’
Atlas Obscura | ‘Fascinating Photos from the Secret Trash Collection in a New York Sanitation Garage’
Independent | ‘It is hard being a columnist for eighteen years – here’s how I got through it’
You Tube | The Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan gets caught out by a chart on Newsnight
Time | ‘See Zaha Hadid’s Most Awe-Inspiring Buildings’
The Guardian | ‘The invention of the colour purple’
Quartz | ‘The world’s blackest color belongs to one person—and he’s Instagramming his victory’