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 August 2016.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
WSJ | ‘A Field Guide to Red and Blue America’
FiveThirtyEight | ‘Who will win the presidency?’ – here’s the flagship 538 viz for this election
Polygraph | ‘The songs and technique of famed DJ Grandmaster Flash’
Data Sketches | A 12 month collaboration between Nadieh and Shirley ‘Each month, we choose a topic and aim to have a visualization completed by the end of the month.’
New York Times | ‘Decisive Moments at the Rio Olympics, Frame By Frame’
Smoky Mountains | ‘The Fall Foliage Prediction Map: 2016 edition’
New York Times | ‘From the Slowest Swim to the Fastest Bike, Gold Medal Racing Speeds on the Same Scale’
AESM Physiotherapy | ‘Youngest and oldest olympic gold medalists’
The Guardian | ‘How Katie Ledecky obliterated her own world record in the 400m freestyle’ (See whole series, links at the bottom)
ONS | ‘Save the date: Looking at marriage registrations in more detail, by month and by date, shows some interesting patterns.’
New York Times | All their Rio 2016 Interactive Stories in one place…
New York Times | …but I must highlight one of my favourites: ‘Olympic Races, in Your Neighborhood’
Cool Green Science | ‘Migration in Motion: Visualizing Species Movements Due to Climate Change’
PLOS One | Paper: ‘Innovative Visualizations Shed Light on Avian Nocturnal Migration’ (multiple authors)
SRF | (Translated) ‘Thanks to a new survey method linguists have first evaluated the speech habits of around 670,000 German people.’
Swim Swam | ‘Was there a problem with the Rio pool?’
Articles
The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse, interviews and videos
Medium | ‘About Trump’s hands… Are they really that tiny? We do the stats!’
Ann K Emery | ‘How the sketching process works’
Guardian | ‘Can you get to know a person through data alone?’
Medium | ‘Data design & comics — What Alan Moore and the red thread can teach us about information design’
Source | ‘How we rebuilt the Wall Street Journal’s graphics team’
ProPublica | ‘Looks Can Kill: The Deadly Results of Flawed Design’
Michael Babwahsingh | ‘Saving Information Design History: Part 2’ (with link in there to Part 1)
FT | ‘Simple techniques for bridging the graphics language gap’
EagerEyes | Grumpy Kosara Part 1: ‘Stacked Bars Are the Worst’
EagerEyes | Grumpy Kosara Part 2: ‘The Repetitive and Boring History of Visualization’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, resources, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
D3 in Depth | ‘D3 in Depth (by the excellent Peter Cook) aims to bridge the gap between introductory tutorials/books and the official documentation.’
Google Sheets | ‘This spreadsheet tracks the items published in Data Is Plural, a weekly newsletter highlighting useful and curious datasets’
Medium | ‘Design Better Data Tables’
Vimeo | Paolo Ciuccarelli’s talk from Eyeo Festival 2016 ‘The Poetics of Data Experiences (and How to Teach it)’
Questions in DataViz | ‘How should you prepare a visualisation project?’ (Perhaps a shameless inclusion because Neil references my book extensively but very nice to see it in practice)
Poynter | ‘How The New York Times used its archives to make the past a (virtual) reality’
ONS | ‘In a relationship – it’s complicated: A strategy for choosing the right chart.’
Facebook | From 2014 but worth another bump ‘Methods for Exploratory Media Analysis’ by Lev Manovich
YouTube | ‘News Lab Data Visualization Round Up with Alberto Cairo August 2016’
ProPublica | ‘Here are all of the materials we used to teach the 2016 ProPublica Data Institute: slides, exercises, links, and homework.’
Ben Collins | ‘Recreating Tufte’s famous weather chart with Google Sheets and Charts API’
Oceanography | ‘True Colors of Oceanography: Guidelines for Effective and Accurate Colormap Selection’
ViljamiS | ‘Typography for User Interfaces’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Kyrandale | New book: ‘Data visualization with Python and JavaScript’ by Kyran Dale
Mapbox | ‘Announcing the Mapbox Studio dataset editor’
John Grimwade | New blog! If you had a wish list of people who you would want to see starting a blog, John would be in the top 5
Winning With Analytics | New Blog by Dr Bill Gerrard on the use of analytics in sport
Sundries
Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data/technology focus or just seem worthy of sharing
New York Times | ‘Can You Beat Usain Bolt Out of the Blocks?’…
FT | … as well as ‘On Your Marks! Can you react faster than an Olympic athlete?’
Variance Explained | ‘Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half’
Robert Grant Stats | ‘Want some data that look a certain way or have certain stats, but don’t have the time to look for a suitable data set or write a program to simulate it? Draw it’
Mewo2 | ‘Generating fantasy maps’
Lisa Rost | ‘How I Feel When I Have A Conversation’
Font Squirrel | ‘Upload an image with type and we’ll identify the fonts that match.’
New York Times | ‘Driving tips: How You Can Help Limit Traffic Jams’
c82 | ‘National Parks Posters: Celebrate 100 years of the National Park Service with beautifully detailed posters of every park.’
Mother Jones | ‘This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now’
The Verge | ‘Welcome to Airspace: How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world’