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 January 2020. (Note that some links lead to paywall items, for which you may have limited access before having to pay).
Visualisations & Infographics
Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.
Morning Consult | ‘Can You Locate Iran? Few Voters Can.’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?’
Bloomberg | Bloomberg’s “Live Climate Scoreboard
for the World” which includes a link to this components, ‘Tree Loss: It’s not just the Amazon rainforest.’
Tableau Public | ‘The Shapes of the PGA Tour’
@Cchurchili | ‘Eastern #China is the worlds factory’
@data_ink | ‘”Rocket” Ronnie: The Fastest Ever 147 Break’
Vis4.net | ‘2019 was hotter than normal – but what does this even mean?’
Reuters | ‘Sizing up Australia’s bushfires’
New York Times | ‘Killer Slime, Dead Birds, an Expunged Map: The Dirty Secrets of European Farm Subsidies’
Carbon Brief | ‘The impacts of climate change at 1.5C, 2C and beyond’
Washington Post | ‘The illustrated encyclopedia of sleeping positions on a plane’
Digital Times | ‘The best of the Times Interactive team’
@jburnmurdoch | ‘A portrait of weekend working in the UK, told through people & numbers’
C82 | ‘Goethe’s Colors: A visual catalogue of the colours mentioned in Goethe’s Theory of Colours from 1810’
@AndrewM_Webb | ‘To count an animal population if you can’t catch them all…’
Info We Trust | ‘Couture Cartography: These hand-stitched maps will fill you with joy.’
National Geographic | ‘Here’s how coronavirus spreads on a plane—and the safest place to sit’
Jane Zhang | ‘Beyond the Surface: Data visualizations of mental health’
Reuters | ‘Assessing Australia’s “ecological disaster”’
@aLucasLopez | ‘Auschwitz, 75th anniversay: Graphic novel + infographics + journalism. By Josemi Benitez’
Color Theft | ‘The visualization shows the most used colors of 50 artists. Each artist has their individual color footprint.’
Scientific American | ‘”Birdbrain” Turns from Insult to Praise ‘
@AlexanderVar7 | ‘Here is my new viz “Japanese Architectural Heritage”. Used colored 3d models in #tableau’
National Geographic | ‘Weather shows evidence of climate change every single day since 2012’
@Koen_VdE | ‘Europe leads the way in banning harmful pesticides’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Who Will Win The 2020 Democratic Primary?’
Washington Post | ‘Taal volcano’s crater lake is nearly empty’
Estadao | ‘An AI-Guided Tour Of Museo Del Prado’ [Translated]
SCMP | All the online visualisation and infographics works by South China Morning Post in one place
Reuters | ‘Australian Bushfires: A devastated east coast’
New York Times | ‘Excavating The Computer Room’
National Geographic | ‘The Pacific’s Fiery Ring: See where dangerous volcanoes lurk along the Ring of Fire’
FlowingData | ‘Guessing Names Based on What They Start With’
The Guardian | ‘Visual guide: see how Australia’s bushfires are raging across the country’
Peter Cook | ‘Interactive organograms ‘
Washington Post | ‘More than 1 million fires in Australia detected by satellites since September’
@KieranMaguire | ‘A Wolves fan asked me to calculate the average weekly wage paid by clubs in the Premier League every year since its formation.’
@ryanwmckenna | ‘It’s been over a month since the general election. This is a summary of the whole design process and the technology that our live graphics team used across BBC One Scotland, BBC Scotland & BBC Alba’
Reuters | ‘The 5% at Davos
The outsiders inside the bubble of the World Economic Forum’
@O_Syringa_Z | ‘Had fun making gradient colored Mekko chart to describe the area & depth of world lakes.’
@InfoVanguardia | ‘Visual chronicle of the concert of Rosalia’ [Translated]
Stamen | ‘2019: Data visualization projects by Stamen Design’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
Nightingale | ‘How I Became Myself Again: What Writing Did for My Self-Worth in 2019’
Nightingale | ‘2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream’
Viz Zen Data | ‘#MomsWhoViz: Interview with Karen Hinson’
Nightingale | ‘The Cycle of Encoding and Decoding: How does data visualization work?’
Interaction Design | ‘Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces’
Nightingale | ‘The Missing Legacy of Marie Neurath: Recognizing the co-creator of the Isotype as a data visualization pioneer’
Data Viz Today | ‘Our advice to data viz designers just starting out’
Duncan Geere | Nice (growing) series from Duncan about ‘Tools I Love’
The Economist | ‘Charting new territory: How The Economist designs charts for Instagram’
Multiple Views | ‘Material Traces as Autographic Visualizations’
@kainazamaria | Kainaz is one of the clearest voices about editorial responsibility with regards to the use of photoimagery
Medium | ‘When data and visuals unite: How SCMP became Asian data journalism top dog’
Tableau | ‘Is your analytics strategy generating value? Three models for calculating BI value’
Northwestern Magazine | ‘Understanding Uncertainty’
@infowetrust | ‘Charts that mislead: A problem since 1917 ‘
Reflections in Design | ‘In this latest blog post I define the various elements of typography and how I feel they can be implemented in data visualisation.’
Catalyst Journal | ‘“Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies’
Quartz | ‘Designers and statisticians disagree on what makes a good information graphic’
Science | ‘Figure it out: motion capture for 3D illustration’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Data Viz Today | ‘Episode 50: How to Fill Your Data Viz Toolbox’
Medium | ‘Leonardo: an open source contrast-based color generator’
Datawrapper | ‘Ever looked a bar chart in the eye before?’
Tableau Public | ‘I want to learn’ by George Gorczynski – Tableau Conference 2019 sessions catalogued and broken down into chapters. Jump directly to a topic of your interest’
@jscarto | Important discussion about mapping wildfires
Datawrapper | ‘Introducing materials for Datawrapper workshops’
Stamen | ‘Exploring the impact of global warming on North American birds with Audubon’
Teacups, Giraffes, and Statistics | ‘A series of illustrated online modules to teach statistics and R coding, set in a playful narrative about fictional miniature giraffes.’
New York Times | ‘These People Really Care About Fonts’
Multiple Views | ‘What eye tracking can tell you about visualizations (and other images)’
C82 | ‘Making of Goethe’s Colours’ (project above)
Kasper on BI | ‘Build your custom visual with Charticulator and Power BI’
Datylon | ‘Datylon Graph: Design compelling data stories with our advanced data visualization plugin for Adobe Illustrator’
Stamen | ‘Environmental Data Visualization: Many Dimensions of Lake Tahoe’
FT | ‘How map makers will win the 2020 US election’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Sage Publishing | New Book: ‘Making Sense of Data in the Media’ by Andrew Bell, Todd Hartman, Aneta Piekut, Alasdair Rae, and Mark Taylor
@callin_bull | Coming in August… ‘Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World’
Google | ‘Discovering millions of datasets on the web’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
@datentaeterin | ‘My family has a new hobby: We knit datavisualizations 🧶📊’
@sturdyAlex | ‘This BBC advertising for Dracula is genius.’
Supercool | ‘Amazon’s accidental email template’
@hattiehattie | ‘The one and only Charlie Brooker on why some writing is best done standing up; the process of making Black Mirror; and how to take critical feedback with minimal sulking’
@_cingraham | ‘Insanely jealous I didn’t think to write the WSJ cord box story, it’s so frigging good’
@veltman | ‘A very R-rated dataset, 23k vanity license plate applications from the California DMV’
@alicemhancock | ‘This advert from 1962 is *astounding*’
@FryRsquared | A thread rebuking the idea that AI could predict a movie’s likely success
@FryRsquared | ‘Last week, the lovely folk at National Grid showed me around their amazing underground tunnels’