Best of the visualisation web… April 2020

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 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.

People of the Pandemic | ‘People of the Pandemic: A hyperlocal cooperative simulation game

Joshua Stevens | ‘New Map Poster of the Topographic Relief of Mars’

Duncan Geere | ‘Carbon in Context lets you compare wildly different quantities of CO2 emissions without resorting to log scales’

Bloomberg | ‘How 2020 Remapped Your Worlds’

SCMP | ‘How the coronavirus spread in Hong Kong’

New York Times | ‘Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread’

De Volkskrant | ‘How are we going to solve the pandemic puzzle?’

Washington Post | ‘This is how mass unemployment looks on the ground’

@sarahslo | ‘Thread: I got curious about what is underneath the economy. worry about what weakness we are not yet seeing. @fcage and I were talking about this, we started looking at data and asking questions.’

The Pudding | ‘This is a music challenge, testing how well you recognize historic hits.’

The Guardian | ‘How coronavirus spread across the globe – visualised’

ABC | ‘Unrecognisable: Historic photos show Australia in shutdown’

Tribune de Genève | ‘The latest figures on the epidemic in Switzerland’

New York Times | ‘America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why.’

Washington Post | ‘How coronavirus grounded
the airline industry’

FiveThirtyEight | ‘Why The Progressive Left Fits So Uncomfortably Within The Democratic Party’

The Guardian | ‘The traffic data that shows the road into – and out of – Covid-19 lockdown’

Scott Reinhard Maps | ‘Scott Reinhard Maps’… rather beautifully

The Guardian | ‘Britain breaks record for coal-free power generation’

Reuters | ‘Sheltering in small places: What life indoors looks like in Tokyo’s cramped homes’

Nesta | ‘Measuring regional skill mismatches: Can big data help?’

Washington Post | ‘Crisis begins to hit professional and public-sector jobs once considered safe’

New York Times | ‘How Coronavirus Mutates and Spreads’

New York Times | ‘Hidden Outbreaks Spread Through U.S. Cities Far Earlier Than Americans Knew, Estimates Say’

Studio Terp | ‘The Hotel New Hampshire: A data-art project’

ABC | ‘What we can learn from the countries winning the coronavirus fight’

The Pudding | ‘The Infinite Monkey Theorem Experiment’

The Economist | ‘Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries’

The Times | ‘Learning the language of lockdown’

Reuters | ‘How coronavirus hitched a ride through China’

ABC | ‘Scientists translate coronavirus spike protein into music, revealing more about its structure’

ABC | ‘The lockdown effect’

Bloomberg | ‘Coronavirus Is Spreading and Cruise Ships Are Still Sailing’

Articles

These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.

Five Thirty Eight | ‘Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model ‘

Five Thirty Eight | ‘One Chart Isn’t Going To Tell You When The Pandemic Peaked’

@nightingale | ‘Re-Viz-ited: Every Volcanic Eruption Since 1880’

Fast Company | ‘Andrew Cuomo’s PowerPoints are endearingly primitive, so this designer redid them’

University of Maryland | ‘How Data Visualization Helps Us to Approach the COVID-19 Pandemic’

@nightingale | ‘Making Data Physical Could Help Us Care for the Planet’

ppa | Interview with Helen Atkinson, visual data journalist at The Economist

Scientific American | ‘Leading with the Unknowns in COVID-19 Models: In times of great uncertainty, we should look beyond the data’

Nightingale | ‘Lessons From China’s COVID-19 Visualizations’

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Interaction Design Foundation | ‘Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces’

Data Stories | ‘Episode 158, Viz Agencies, with CLEVER°FRANKE and Interactive Things’

@samjoiner | Useful thread discussing the reasons behind a switch from a symbol map of coronavirus cases in the UK to a ridge map

University of California, Merced | A pre-print of ‘Uncertainty Visualization’, to appear in the Handbook of Computational Statistics and Data Science, by Lace Padilla, Matthew Kay, and Jessica Hullman

YouTube | ‘How coronavirus charts can mislead us’ by Vox

Voila | ‘Behind the scenes: How we visualized gender inequality’

YouTube | ‘Create & Learn – Art & Science in Our Online Life Data’

Visual Cinnamon | ‘Case study: A sky map of the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.

Data Journalism | Book: ‘Verification Handbook: For Disinformation And Media Manipulation’ edited by Craig Silverman

John Benjamins | Book: ‘Special issue of Information Design Journal 25:1 (2019)’

Sundries

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.

@aLucasLopez | ‘Epic illustrated map of the Met Museem by @JohnKerschbaum’

Guardian | ‘Smart lifts, lonely workers, no towers or tourists: architecture after coronavirus’

@Worville | ‘There’s plenty of sports that Premier League teams lean on for inspiration and right now F1 is a big one. ‘

The Guardian | ‘Lockdown has cut Britain’s vibrations, seismologists find’