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 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.
Wall Street Journal | ‘Where Are All the Women CEOs?’
@Humphreytalks | ‘Jeff Bezos net worth represented visually by rice.’
@EdConwaySky | ‘This is a story about a chart. A pretty astonishing chart. A chart that has all sorts of consequences, including misleading ministers, distorting our view on the nature of the UK economy and creating a genuine mystery about what’s going on in the bowels of the UK economy’
@JanWillemTulp | ‘For the Dutch Railways, I have created an interactive #dataviz for their 2019 annual report that shows train travel on an average working day’
Washington Post | ‘An Illustrated History of the Super Bowl Halftime Show’
Unearthed | ‘The pesticide giants making billions on toxic and bee-harming chemicals’
@GurmanBhatia | ‘Here is a thread with everything we have done at @reutersgraphics on the new #coronavirus coronavirus.’ [A long growing thread that started on Feb 1st]
Financial Times | ‘A new look at antique US railroad maps reveals how cities grew over the past 200 years. The FT’s Alan Smith and Steven Bernard trace how cities, people and the economy spread from coast to coast’
SND | ‘The Society for News Design’s 8 finalists for World’s Best-Designed™ in Digital’
Economist | ‘Data from Spotify suggest that listeners are gloomiest in February’
New York Times | ‘Results: The Most Detailed Map of the Iowa Democratic Caucus’
Fathom | Nice fresh website design for this excellent information design group
@CraigTaylorViz | …and likewise from Craig Taylor, with loads more of his great projects
Go4Trees | …and on the same theme, a very nice collection of work from Liuhuaying Yang, a data visualization practitioner based in Singapore
Washington Post | ‘Congrats! You dump 100 plastic bottles in nature each year’
Economist | ‘Covid-19 is now in 50 countries, and things will get worse’ (including one of the first ‘flatten the curve’ graphics published to a mainstream audience)
@jscarto | ‘Amid efforts to reduce pollution in #China, the signal from quarantines remains clear’
@jburnmurdoch | ‘…how #coronavirus shows up in Chinese data’
@JZarracina | ‘The cruise ship Diamond Princess has the largest concentration of coronavirus cases outside Mainland China.’
@HeikkiVesanto | ‘Ireland 2020 Election Results. Hex map of results, and constituencies split into equal areas based on number of seats.’
@porridgebrain | ‘I decided that this year, every day, I would knit a row on a scarf to mark the corresponding daily temperature/weather of my town.’
@robdelaney | [About America’s Economic Pie…] ‘Can’t believe this is on CBS. This guy @tonydokoupil is so good; such a light touch.’
@abmakulec | ‘Visualizing a year with little one in pizza slices and a pizza box.’
@veltman | ‘There’s a big genre of news graphics that are about showing that a huge number is really huge, or a tiny number is really tiny…’
@MonaChalabi | ‘Meet Jason Korn’
Wall Street Journal | ‘The Week That Wiped $3.4 Trillion off the Stock Market’
@ScienceManga | ‘Working with Professional Illustrators to Visualize Your Science’ booklet issued from Kyoto University
Medium | ‘Emoting with Pop Culture’
@VizWizBI | ‘Visualizing the Geography of TV Stations’
@ChrisDanforth | ‘A new instrument for visualizing temporal changes in a complex system’
@DavisVilums | ‘Exactly 5 years ago I started my journey to visit every single street in Central London. This is how London’s grid emerges, using only my cycling journeys.’
@adamemccann | Really nice demonstration of the new animated transition effects in Tableau
@jburnmurdoch | ‘How do footballers compare to the stars of US sports in terms of stature?’
Mother Jones | ‘Mike Bloomberg Is Way Richer Than People Realize’
@ThamKhaiMeng | ‘Japanese newspaper uses Augmented Reality to show animated charts.’
Bloomberg | ‘Airbnb to America’s Big Cities: See You in Court’
The Pudding | ‘Do Authors Write Where They Know?’
S2S4E | Very nice methods for visualising temperature forecasts
@AlexSteffen | ‘This is the simplest graphical representation of ongoing, repeated foresight failure I’ve ever seen.’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
Esri | ‘Mapping coronavirus, responsibly’
BBC | ‘Coronavirus: How a misleading map went global’
Voila | ‘The genius of Hans Rosling, frame by frame’
NN group | ‘Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?’
Economist | ‘Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz’
Social Research Association | ‘Dr Reka Solymosi describes how she has found ways to communicate about crime data and analysis with young people’
Nightingale | ‘The Hidden Data Story Behind Super Bowl Tickets’
The Times | ‘‘Expected threat’, ‘width per sequence’ – the statistical metrics you haven’t heard of’
Info We Trust | ‘”Illustration Invades Everything” – Reflections by Minard on his graphical impact.’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
@maartenzam | ‘Starting a hands on class on data visualisation at an arts school tomorrow. I’ll just give the students an assignment, and a list of tools. Here are the #dataviz tools…’
@spatialanalysis | ‘Here’s a colour breaks cheatsheet for those who don’t know their quantiles from their elbow….
It’s great advice for choosing how to colour maps and other dataviz.’
OSF Preprints | New paper: ‘A Probabilistic Grammar of Graphics’ by Xiaoying Pu and Matthew Kay
@mslima | ‘I’m trying to collect examples where data visualization led to tangible and measurable impact in a given area.’
@AmyCesal | ‘We’ve collected links to resources about data visualization that were previously scattered across the internet’
Interaction Design Foundation | ‘Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Johns Hopkins University Press | New Book: ‘Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings’ by Valerie Trouet
@sabinedevins | ‘I made an @instagram filter that tells you what kind of #datavis you are with #sparkAR try it!’
Datylon | ‘We are live! Our dataviz plugin for Illustrator is now available!’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
Guardian | ‘How Finland starts its fight against fake news in primary schools’
@MandiCai | ‘Because of the delayed results,
@nytimes’s Iowa Caucus pages feel like worksheets for my homework due Friday’
@MatthewACherry | The origin tweet of an idea that, four years later, becomes a Oscar winning short film…
Wired | ‘Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet’
@jonmummolo | Paper showing that ‘probabilistic election forecasts like FiveThirtyEight confuse voters & decrease turnout’
New York Times | ‘Take One Last Look at the (Many) Plastic Bags of New York’
@DesignMuseum | ‘To mark the final day of #halfterm, tomorrow’s #fontsunday is dedicated to children’s TV shows. Send in your fondest memories…’