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 2020.
Notes: the items listed may not have been necessarily published during this month, rather discovered during the month. Some links point to paywall items. The details shown below label the platform/site each item is published on – not necessarily the actual author – and a brief selective description.
Visualisations & Infographics
Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.
@romsson | ‘How long it took to reach 500 #COVID deaths?
(by countries)’
The Marshall Project | ‘Why Jails Are So Important in the Fight Against Coronavirus’
Washington Post | ‘Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”’
@MonaChalabi | ‘0.03%’
SCMP | ‘China’s wildlife trade’
Physics Today | ‘Hubble’s 30-year legacy’
Bloomberg | ‘Coronavirus Lockdown Has Emptied London’s Bustling Streets’
New York Times | ‘How the Virus Got Out’
@ncasenmare | Thread of graphical illustrations explaining contact tracing
The Pudding | ‘The Evolution of the American Census’
HCIL | ‘List of Visualizations related to the Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic’
New York Times | ‘Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak’
Datawrapper | ‘#FlattenTheCurve’
The Shape of Dreams | ‘A visual exploration of Google searches for the interpretation of dreams’
The Economist | ‘Foot traffic has fallen sharply in cities with big coronavirus outbreaks’
Washington Post | ‘From ‘It’s going to disappear’ to ‘WE WILL WIN THIS WAR’’
@SiouxsieW | One of the most widely shared and seen versions of the ‘flatten the curve’ graphic explainer
@Frankman1000 | ‘The ONS’s Housing Affordability Calculator
Mapbox | ‘Where and when local travel decreased from COVID-19 around the world: What telemetry data tells us’
@jburnmurdoch | ‘We’re tracking real-time data to get an indication of how and when countries are locking down, and which Asian countries are getting back up and running.’
New York Times | ‘How Coronavirus Hijacks Your Cells’
@jonni_walker | ‘Tracking Bar-headed Geese in @Mapbox & @Tableau’
@joshbegley | ‘Every @nytimes story. Watch the virus become the whole page.’
@juruwolfe | ‘Pick your own Super Tuesday winners and watch our forecast adjust in real time.’
Nightingale | ‘Visualizing 36 Hours on the Alcan Highway’
@KevinQ | ‘Not the most normal chart I’ve ever seen’
Washington Post | ‘Safe Passages: Rocky Mountain animals will move as the climate warms. These corridors could give them an easier path.’
@Reuters | ‘Cities across the globe look deserted as governments urged people to stay indoors’
@nigelhawtin | ‘Enjoyed doing this for
Scientific American: What is really killing monarch butterflies?’
@rileydchampine | ‘These charts show how different U.S. cities fared during the 1918 #spanishflu’
Saralenzi | ‘Sonifying COVID-19: strategies compared, quickly and from quarantine’
Vox | ‘These 3 supertrees can protect us from climate collapse: But can we protect them?’
@puddingviz | ‘We want to amplify the vitally important work that’s already being done. (Read through this thread and we’ll continue to add examples.)’
@VismeApp | ‘Today, we are starting an ongoing thread with the best #dataviz about the #coronavirus #COVIDー19 pandemic.’
Radio Canada | ‘Self-driving cars
Who to save, who to sacrifice?’
@yurivish | ‘I made a visualization that argues the case for local governments to enact strong quarantine measures as quickly as possible.’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
Van Schneider | ‘A data designer’s responsibility during a global crisis’
Poynter | ‘How a blockbuster Washington Post story made ‘social distancing’ easy to understand’
Nightingale | ‘How Self-Employed Data Visualization Designers Make a Living’
Chartio | ‘We Made SQL Visual – Why and How’
The Guardian | ‘Catherine D’Ignazio: ‘Data is never a raw, truthful input – and it is never neutral’
Hyperallergic | ‘COVID-19 Statistics in Instructive, Comforting Illustrations’
Eager Eyes | ‘The Visual Evolution of the “Flattening the Curve” Information Graphic’
Nightingale | ‘How to Visualize Layered Data to Show Holistic Relationships’
Voila | ‘How we rebranded an information design firm’
Will Chase | ‘Why I’m not making COVID19 visualizations, and why you (probably) shouldn’t either’
It’s Nice That | ‘National Geographic’s creative director explains the Optimism vs Pessimism issue’
The Atlantic | ‘The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It’
MIT | ‘3Q: Collaborating with users to develop accessible designs’
Nightingale | ‘Three Sportviz Inventions By a Hungarian Newspaper’
@sxywu | ‘I worked w/
@mplusmuseum to feature HK women artists and highlight their underrepresentation on @Wikipedia.’
Technology Review | ‘The best, and the worst, of the coronavirus dashboards’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
We All Count | ‘Data Speak Decoder: If you want to Democratize, Demonstrate, Demystify data we need to pay attention to the words we use.’
@CT_Bergstrom | ‘A personal thread about the experience of working at the intersection of infectious disease modeling and the study of misinformation during the worst pandemic in a century.’
Clever Franke | Process narrative behind ‘A data driven identity for the Eurovision 2020 Song Contest that unifies and celebrates’
ABC | ‘What we can learn from the countries winning the coronavirus fight’
@EvanMPeck | ‘Creating data-driven maps of #COVID19 is hard, but I worry that a lot of people are being mislead because designers aren’t externalizing the tradeoffs of their visual representations. (thread)’
Medium | The design process story behind ‘The Shape of Dreams’
@vis_research | ‘What makes a good tool for creating visualizations? How do we reflect on their trade-offs?’
@wallacetim | ‘Ahoy, #NICAR20. Here are a couple references for my class on finding and telling stories with earth imagery’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
Amazon | New Book: ‘Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World’ by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
Medium | ‘Why we’re combining our data and interactive teams to form a single data and digital storytelling desk’
@SnoForData | ‘We’re proud to announce the launch of Sno, a new open source project for distributed version-control for geospatial & tabular data!’
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
@blprnt | ‘…I just learned that weather modeling is less precise right now because available data from commercial aircraft has been severely reduced’
@presentcorrect | ‘Typology of London’s Coal Hole Covers’
@infowetrust | ‘…Bar chart emoji are all innately offensive. Here is a thread rating them all.’