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 April 2017.
Visualisations & Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
Newsmood | ‘This tool allows you to visualise the hidden emotional context of news headlines’
Thomson Reuters | ‘The Rohingya Exodus: A desperate escape’
Washington Post | This is storytelling with data, ‘These lawmakers might want to consider crossing the aisle in the 115th Congress’
TWO-N | ‘Global Gender Gap Report’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘How (un)popular is Donald Trump?’
Krisztina Szücs | ‘The Parallel Reality of Hungarian Government Media’
Adventures in Mapping | ‘Lights On & Lights Out’
Vimeo | ‘Multimodal Symphony: 24 hours of transit in New York City’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘The Case For Stephen Curry, MVP’ (particularly like the comet plots)
SoundViz | ‘Your favourite sound as beautiful art’
The Upshot | ‘You Draw It: Just How Bad Is the Drug Overdose Epidemic?’
Thomson Reuters | ‘A show of force: Deconstructing all of Kim Jong Un’s major parades and highlight the messages they carry.’
Medium | ‘Organizing the World of Fonts with AI’
Resource Trade | ‘Exploring interdependencies in global resource trade’
National Geographic | ‘Seven things to know about climate change’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Star Wars, In One Chart’
Flowing Data | ‘Years You Have Left to Live, Probably’
Datavis.club | ‘Travel Visa Inequality’
The Pudding | ‘Craft beer — so hot right now. But what city is the microbrew capital of the US?’
The Economist | ‘What the world worries about’
Washington Post | ‘Here’s what we know so far about Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests’
National Geographic | ‘What Will Become of Scotland’s Moors?’ (check out the beautiful map half way down)
Hindustan Times | ‘What’s it like to get trolled all day long?’
John Guerra | ‘Who to follow in openvisconf’
Deck.gl | ‘Wind Map’
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
YouTube | ‘John Maeda on the three types of design, the four quarters of life, and diversity’ (video)
Richard Brath | ’50 categoric colors, inspired by telephone wires’ some interesting thoughts about categorical patterns
Medium | ‘Automatically generate beautiful visualizations from your data: And other bad ideas’
Medium | ‘Banning exploration in my infovis class’
Medium | ‘Crafting Data-Driven Maps’ (at Uber)
Mikevizneros | ‘Dashboard Confessional: Thinking Out Loud’
Medium | A further contribution from Lynn to recent discussions in the – and about – the field: ‘Data Visualization “Versus” UI and Data Science’
Medium | …and here’s another from Jorge ‘Dispatches from the data visualization gutter’
Lisa Charlotte Rost | ‘Embracing Curiosity’
GV Library | ‘Everyone is a designer. Get over it.’
John Grimwade | ‘Fake data viz: Instant visualizations.’
Map Brief | ‘Few Interact With Our Interactive Maps–What Can We Do About It?’
TED | ‘How we can find ourselves in data’
FastCo Design | ‘How To Use Color To Prove Your Point, From A Data Viz Expert’
Robin Kwong | ‘Lessons from the Exploratorium’
Medium | ‘Designers vs Developers — Accurat @ Visualized Milan’
Medium | A very personal reflection from Matt Daniels about a talk he gave at OpenVis
Wired | ‘Steve Ballmer’s USAFacts Uses Smart Design To Make Sense of Government Spending’
Medium | More insightful observations from Elijah Meeks ‘Strategic Innovation in Data Visualization Will Not Come From Tech’
Pro Publica | ‘When the Designer Shows Up In the Design’
Medium | ‘The superpower of interactive datavis? A micro-macro view!’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, academic papers, development opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Simple Maps | ‘A Guide to Making SVG maps with MapShaper’
New Scientist | ‘Creative people physically see and process the world differently’
Oregon State | Paper: ‘Design principles for origin-destination flow maps’ by Bernhard Jenny et al
Dueling Data | ‘NFL Combine & Triangle/Ternary Plot’ (including how-to)
GitHub | ‘Perceptions of Probability and Numbers’
IBM | ‘Art meets science: Data visualization guidelines’
Axis Maps | Excellent summary of the issues/solutions surrounding ‘Map Projections’
Tableau | ‘Mapping Real Time Flights – Beginner Tutorial’
Spatial.ly | ‘Population Lines: How and Why I Created It’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new/new-to-me sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Material | Nice resource – ‘Color Tool: Create, share, and apply color palettes to your UI, as well as measure the accessibility level of any color combination.’
SITE | Love these highlighted gifs ‘How the N.B.A.’s Craftiest Players Draw Fouls’
Maarten Lambrechts | ‘Malofiej25: the awards’
AirBnB | ‘Painting with Code: Introducing our new open source library React Sketch.app’
NYTCo | ‘Stuart Thompson Named Graphics Director, Opinion’
TechNode | ‘This startup wants to shake up data visualization with VR’
Tech Crunch | ‘Uber’s open source data visualization tool now goes beyond maps’
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
AI Experiments | ‘AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool. It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast.’
Brilliant | ‘Math and science done right: Master concepts by solving fun, challenging problems.’
Vignelli | ‘The Vignelli Canon’
The Guardian | ‘Expected goals and Big Football Data: the statistics revolution that is here to stay’
The Guardian | ‘Google to display fact-checking labels to show if news is true or false’
Open Culture | ‘John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music’
New York Times | ‘How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons’
Mike Hall | Love this portfolio of largely map-based illustrations
Twitter | ‘City of Detroit produced a lookup tables for its absentee precincts in 2016. It’s in Excel. But wait for it…’
John Grimwade | ‘The art of arrangement’
RaspberryPi | ‘Processing: Making art with code’
FT | ‘Can a robot do your job?’
Twitter | ‘…this is how the #BetterCallSaul writers break an episode’
The Guardian | ‘Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site’