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 May 2020.
Note: 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.
New York Times | ‘New York is quiet. Listen to the birds’
@katemclean | ‘Version 2 of the hospital corridor #smellscape’
@theneilrichards | ‘Now on
@tableaupublic – all 31 days of my self-appointed #31DaysOfFlood challenge’
SCMP | ‘United States passes 100,000 coronavirus deaths: If New York was a graveyard’
New York Times | ’54 Ways Coronavirus Has Changed Our World’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Without A Vaccine, Herd Immunity Won’t Save Us’
New York Times | ‘An Incalculable Loss’
BBC | ‘Which Premier League squads need work in the transfer window?’
Reuters | ‘For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection’ (Like the stringy Sankey)
Gabrielle Merite | Really nice portfolio of work (and site)
@ftdata | ‘SpaceX has become the first private company to launch humans into orbit’
@PostGraphics | ‘One hundred thousand Americans dead in less than four months. Each of those deaths is represented as a ray of light.’
@tjukanov | ‘Northern (Finland) Growth Zone Information Service: Regional indicators, live traffic data and mobile location data visualized with #KeplerGL’
@CraigTaylorViz | ‘Los Angeles Bus Journeys’
@PostGraphics | ‘A deadly ‘checkerboard’: Covid-19’s new surge across rural America’
@joshbegley | ‘Every coronavirus story on the front page of the New York Times. This is 2020 so far.’
Reuters | ‘Anatomy of Singapore’s outbreak’
Happy Data | ‘Hopeful views of the world through data and drawings.’
PolicyViz | ‘PolicyViz Data Visualization Catalog’
Heineken | ‘A tool that offers employees across the globe transparency about their career opportunities’ (work by Jan Willem Tulp)
New York Times | ‘A Study Said Covid Wasn’t That Deadly. The Right Seized It.’
@rastrau | ‘How is our mobility changing because of #COVID19 & as a result of easing?’ [Translated]
@AlexanderVar7 | ‘The Consciousness on Nations’
Articles
These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.
DesignObserver | ‘Birthing Dataviz’
Online Journalism Blog | ‘Coronavirus: 3 ways journalists need to get to grips with uncertainty during the pandemic’
LSE | ‘The public do not understand logarithmic graphs used to portray COVID-19’
Robert Janezic | ‘Experimenting in Data Visualization’
Medium | ‘Discovering ‘Moments that Matter’ for truly meaningful Data Design’
Nightingale | ‘Really pleased that my second essay on building a career in #dataviz is published!’
Nightingale | ‘How Do You Simulate a Pandemic?’
@kennethfield | ‘I had a great time chatting to the FT’s Alan Smith a couple of weeks ago about coronavirus coxcombs and waffles’
@AlbertoCairo | ‘The Dawn of a Philosophy of Visualization’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Nightingale | ‘COVID-19 Data Literacy is for Everyone’
UncertaintyVizBrowser | ‘The UncertaintyVis Browser: An Interactive Survey of Uncertainty Visualisation Research Publications.’
YouTube | ‘How coronavirus charts can mislead us’
@EeDanhi | ‘Off the charts: user engagement enhancers in election infographics’
@jwato_watson | ‘Pixelate to communicate! Varying pixelation is a powerful tool to show point estimates & uncertainty estimates in a single plot/map’
Data Stories | ‘Visualizing COVID-19 with Carl Bergstrom’
@Living_WithData | ‘The Living With Data review of existing research has been published today.’
@lisacrost | ‘Dear #dataviz peeps, let’s discuss: Is it ok to differentiate between categories with lightness, or should we use hues?’
HAL archives-ouvertes | Paper: ‘What is Interaction for Data Visualization?’ by Evanthia Dimara and Charles Perin
@driven_by_data | Excellent thread explaining approach to min-max scales for line charts
Voila | ‘Domesticated Honeybees: Improving conservation through communication
@wattenberg | ‘I’ve been seeing unusual “tornado plot” diagrams floating around, and wrote a tiny interactive tool to help myself understand them.’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.
@J_CD_T | ‘New, Free Data: We have just published the code and data behind our excess mortality tracker on Github.’
(This wasn’t really the month for news of a data visualisation flavour)
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.
Cinephilia & Beyond | A thorough dissection of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ but I especially love the concept art panels half-way down the article
@mslima | ‘What makes a great tool? One of the most elegant definitions I’ve encountered was…’
@visualizevalue | Some nice simple designs to represent thoughts, ideas, mantras etc.
BBC | ‘Why time seems to be going faster while we are in lockdown’
BBC | ‘Why Admiral’s ‘flashy’ England strip now commands respect’
New York Times | ‘Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece’
The Paris Review | ‘How to Draw the Coronavirus’