Best of the visualisation web… February 2013

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 2013.

Visualisations/Infographics

Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.

UX Blog | ‘Sandy and the Buildings of NYC’ – This map paints the surface footprint of every building in the city of New York (pre-Sandy) by where it stands in relation to modeled flood risk from a general storm surge of hurricanes…

National Post News | A tower infographic I actually liked (about The Walking Dead)

Jerome Cukier | Jerome Cukier’s visualisation about the gun-related homicides in US 2010

David Rumsey | An extraordinary collection of vintage and contemporary maps (37,844 of them!)

Brainpickings | A Visualization of Global “Brain Drain” in Science Inspired by Abstract Art

Moebio | Santiago’s had the painters and decorators in and his moebio.com site has been impressively retuned (have a play with the device in the bottom left)

dwtkns | Interactive timeline reveals the progress of streets being cleared of snow in NYC during the downfall of early February

Washington Post | What’s next for the Catholic church?…

LA Times | …and this about Global Catholicism

FastCo Design | Peek Inside The Notebooks Of The World’s Best Comic Artists

John Millward | Deep Inside: A study of 10,000 porn stars and their careers

Harvard Business Review | Multi-framed timeline breaking down the realities of worker productivities – ‘Vision Statement: The Multitasking Paradox’

CartoDB | Meteoritessize: Every meteorite fall on earth mapped

New York Times | Dissecting a Trailer: The Parts of the Film That Make the Cut

FastCo Design | Haze App Lets You See Weather Info, Not Just Read It

The Why Axis | The New York Times and Tesla Motors Engage in Chart Warfare

Boston Globe | ‘Marking the start of second term, Obama calls for unity and action’ – visualization of the language used in inaugural addresses

Halfblog | The infographics of xkcd

Brainpickings | Life in Five Seconds: Minimalist Pictogram Summaries of Pop Culture and Historical Events

Vimeo | TouchWave: Stacked Graphs on the iPad (ACM ITS presentation)

The Standards Manual | ‘This site is dedicated to serve as an archival record of a first edition NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual designed by Massimo Vignelli of Unimark International’

New York Times | Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States

Flowing City | Huge collection of visualisation examples ‘visualizing the city built of data’

Guardian | NFL salaries by team and position – interactive

hrwgc | US Drone Strikes, mapped

New York Times | ‘Among the Oscar Contenders, a Host of Connections’

Bahrain Visualized | Bahrain: Two Years On

Pop Chart Lab | The Various Varieties of Vegetables

Neoformix | Obesity around the world

Wired | App reveals hidden world lurking in your videos

FastCo Design | Infographic: Everything You Were Afraid To Ask About Poop

Articles

The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse and interviews

EagerEyes | Robert introduces his (and Jock Mackinlay’s) paper on ‘Storytelling, The Next Step for Visualization’

Xocas.com | Making of a student’s project: Katya Fialkova

Salon | How Netflix is turning viewers in to puppets [ironically on a site draped in customised cookie-driven ads…]

Erich’s Packing Center | Packing equal copies – one for the maths/coding fans

Source | ‘A conversation with data visualisation experts: Working notes on the art and its tools from a General Assembly panel’

npr | Chart Check: Did Obama’s Graphics ‘Enhance’ His Big Speech?

DDJ | Data Visualisation Tools and Trends to Watch: An Interview with Datavisualization.ch

Baseline Scenario | The importance of Excel

Excel Charts | Finally revealed: the optimal number of categories in a pie chart

Sociable Physics | The dangers of big data

Simon Rogers | Video: what happens when you get a bunch of data journalists together to discuss journalism

New York Times | Why We Love Beautiful Things

.net | Seven dirty secrets of data visualisation

SimoleonSense | Interview with Amanda Cox: Visualizing Information at The NYT

National Infographic | Judging the World’s Best-Designed Newspaper contest

alt.chi | (Paper) ‘Critical Infovis: Exploring the politics of visualization’

Google Docs | Lev Manovich’s collection of ‘Resources: Creating and publishing visualisations of cultural data’

Hadley Wickham | (Paper) ‘Tidy Data’

FastCo Design | Infographic: Font Lets You Make Data Maps Of The U.S., Just By Typing

DDJ | Data-Driven Documents (D3), Defined – post by Scott Murray

Thought Faucet | Introducing the flowgraph

Poynter | How journalists can create better explainers

Big Think | It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial Morphology

Mapping Complex Information | Evidence-based information design principles

Chrys Wu | Tools, Slides and Links from NICAR13

Learning & Development

These links cover tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.

DDJ | Data Journalists Discuss Their Tools of Choice

Viewtific | Case study: creating a 50-state data visualization on elections administration

For Journalism | Collection of courses around data journalism with each course teaching towards a practical news-application project

Coursera | New course coming in July 2013: Maps and the Geospatial Revolution

If We Assume | The United States of Starbucks

Revolutions | Free e-book on Data Science with R

National Infographic | America strikes oil

PJIM | Volume V, Issue 1 of Parsons Journal for Information Mapping

Martin Graham | Huge collection of links about journals, conferences, labs, people and so much more content around Information Visualization (last updated 2011, however)

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.

MIT Press | New book: ‘Digital_Humanities’, by Peter Lunenfeld, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp

Variable.io | New generative design studio in London

Amazon | Not a new book (1969) but new to me: ‘Practical Charting Techniques’, by Mary Eleanor Spear

Mapping the Nation | Companion site to new book ‘Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in 19th Century America”

Synergy Art | Continuing the map/book theme, here’s another book about maps! ‘Map of the World’ from Gestalten

Shape of Design | ‘The Shape of Design’ by Frank Chimero

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

Explore | The West Wing breaks down what’s wrong with maps

Snow the Movie | That’s right. A movie about Dr John Snow’s battle to expose the truth about London’s cholera outbreak in 1854. Grab the popcorn.