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 February 2017.
Visualisations & Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Reuters | ‘French presidential election’
Emmanuelle Moureaux | ‘Forest of Numbers’
New York Times | ‘What Do You Think Is the Most Important Problem Facing This Country Today?’
LA Times | ‘A runaway energy industry is costing California billions’
The Guardian | ‘How difficult, and how costly, is a hard Brexit?’
Quartz | ‘Explore all $304.6 billion in goods that the US imports from Mexico in a year’
Washington Post | ‘How today’s visa restrictions might impact tomorrow’s America’
YouTube | ‘All That We Share’ (that superb Danish human Venn/Euler diagram experiment)
Pop Chart Lab | ‘A diagrammatical dissertation on opening lines of notable novels’
Guardian | ‘Jacob’s story: a second chance or a path to prison? An interactive case study’
Washington Post | ‘100 days of Trump claims’
Visual-telling | Nice timeline technique for showing the progress history of technologies
Adventures in Mapping | ‘Lego-ified Maps’
BBC | ‘Local voting figures shed new light on EU referendum’
University of Richmond | ‘Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America’
My Life Through Data | ‘My Life Through Data is a physical interactive workbook of activities for people to track their daily habits, visualize them in a beautiful and unique way, then compare their lives to the American average.’
Maarten Lambrechts | ‘My tribute to Hans Rosling’
See, Also | ‘A collection of our favorite visualizations built on Wikipedia data, curated by Hatnote’
Washington Post | ‘The United States of Oil and Gas’
The Public Domain Review | ‘W.E.B. Du Bois’ Hand-Drawn Infographics of African-American Life (1900)’
LA Times | ‘Where ‘La La Land’ was shot in L.A., scene by scene’
Pudding | ‘Where Slang Comes From’
xkcd | ‘Bad Map Projection: Time Zones’
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
EagerEyes | ‘The State of Information Visualization, 2017’
Tom Shanley | Helpful discussion about the merits and possible improvements of the sparkline
Dueling Data | …and here’s an interesting technique idea for adding sparklines to bar charts
Media Shift | Some useful practical tips in this, ‘Checklist: Does Your Data Visualization Say What You Think It Says?’
FlowingData | and similarly here, ‘How to Spot Visualization Lies: Keep your eyes open.’
The Coffeelicious | ..and continuing the theme here too, ‘Why This Map About Immigration Made Me So Angry’
Medium | ‘Crossing America. Thoughts About #MisInfoCon’
Lisa Charlotte Rost | ‘Data Vis in Times of Trump’
John Grimwade | ‘Emojis and beyond’
Medium | ‘The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge’
Gamasutra | ‘What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story’ (from 2005)
Data + Tableau + Me | ‘Dr Curvenomore or: How I learned to stop curving lines and love the bar chart’
Medium | ‘Data Humanism, the Revolution will be Visualized.’
FT | ‘How alternative facts rewrite history: A chart’s ability to mislead is off the scale’
Wired | ‘The nerdy charm of artisinal, hand-drawn infographics’
Medium | ‘The Current State of Adaptive Design’
Michael Babwahsingh | ‘Uniting for Understanding’
Medium | ‘What YouTube told us about the popularity of 2017’s Best Picture Nominees : An interview with Polygraph’
Nature | ‘What’s killing the world’s shorebirds?’
Medium | ‘Why newsrooms need storytelling tools and what we’ve learnt building them’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, academic papers, development opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
TED | ‘Why you should love statistics’, TEDxExeter talk by Alan Smith from Apr 2016
YouTube | ‘Are You Above Average?’ part of an excellent ‘Why Numbers Matter’ series published by the Sheffield Methods Institute
Hackpad | ‘Cognitive science concepts relevant to misinformation’
Khan Academy | Some useful visualisation-related content amongst this set of topics, ‘Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs’
Eager Eyes | ‘Encoding vs. Decoding’
Peltier Tech | Useful references from Jon for Excel books
Github | ‘Extracting the full potential from Data Journalism in 2017’
Zararah | ‘Getting critical with data literacy’
Medium | ‘Intro to Data Science for Academics’
GitHub | ‘On Missing Data Sets’
YouTube | From Knight Center Courses, ‘Ethics of Data Cleaning’
Programming Design Systems | ‘A short history of color theory’
Brown University | ‘Seeing Theory is a project designed to make statistics more accessible to a wider range of students through interactive visualizations’
Storybench | ‘Tips on data visualisation from the Broad Institute’s Bang Wong’
Dropbox | A curated collection of readings about uncertainty
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new/new-to-me sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Chart Accent | ChartAccent is a project that aims to make the process of chart annotation a little bit easier
FT | All of the FT’s visual journalism in one place
Mother Jones | ‘President Trump Likes Graphics and Maps’ (The final two throwaway sentences read very differently right now…)
The Functional Art | ‘Announcing Visual Trumpery: A lecture tour’
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
Timewheel | Sure I’ve included this before but worth another bump ‘Amazing chronophotographs capture patterns birds in flight’
New York Times | ‘Copy Edit This! Quiz No. 3’
Washington Post | ‘Could a subtle tweak to Metro’s map fix overcrowding on the Blue Line?’
PolicyViz | Places to search for images
Jay Duret | ‘Data-Driven Cartooning’
LA Times | ‘How do you feel about America right now? Make your own sign.’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘How One Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer’
Quartz | ‘Want to resist the post-truth age? Learn to analyze photos like an expert would’
It’s Nice That | ‘UN Women Egypt releases intricately illustrated print ads to highlight gender divide at work’
Twitter | ‘The most honest chocolate tablet ever’
The Ringer | ‘LeBron’s Clutch Shot Is Worth a Thousand Words’
Twitter | ‘Watching The 1996 #Oscars camera director direct Cuba Gooding Jr.’s acceptance speech is pure joy’
Time | ‘The Story Behind TIME’s Trump Chaos Cover’