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 January 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
WFP | Interactive globe from Santiago Ortiz displaying the country-by-country stories of donors and recipients involved in the World Food Programme (WFP)
The Refugee Project | “The Refugee Project is an interactive map of refugee migrations around the world in each year since 1975.”
Jehiah | Jehiah 13: An interactive personal report
Twitter | Interactive and animated map shows the range and volume of different terms surrounding the “tweeting happy new year around the world”
Tableau Public | Counting down the top 5 Tableau Public visualisations of 2013
FastCo Design | ‘A Reggae Song That Explains The 2013 Stock Market’. Really.
FastCoExist | ‘A Stunning Visualization Of Every Popular Protest Since 1979’
ConcertHotels | ‘From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years of Rock in less than a minute’
BBC | ‘The seats which could decide the next election’
The Washington Post | ’40 more maps that explain the world’
Mapbox | ‘A woodcut inspired map for city streets’
Bloomberg | ‘Tracking super bowl ticket prices’ (Nice use of connected scatter plot)
Mashable | ‘These 10 Real-Time Visualizations Put the World in Perspective’
Guardian | ‘Burglaries in Australia: by the numbers’
Washington Post | ‘What’s in that image? Masterpieces like you’ve never seen them before’
Apple | ‘Celebrating 30 years since the introduction of the Macintosh’
Boston Globe | ‘A taxonomy of movie psychos: Psychiatrist Samuel Leistedt sorts the diagnosable cases from the villains of pure fantasy’
Washington Post | ‘History through the president’s words’
FlowingData | ‘Famous Movie Quotes’ poster: “The most memorable movie quotes selected by the American Film Institute, represented with charts”
PeopleViz | ‘Where are the Big Polluters since 1971?’
Twitter | Interactive streamgraph that breaks down the speech and reaction to the State of The Union address minute by minute on Twitter
New York Times | Animated/interactive small multiples profiling ‘A Stark Gap in Breast Cancer Deaths’
SCMP | Jane Pong and Cedric Sam look at the Australian Open 2014 ‘Road to victory’: “look at the paths of the top eight players in the tournament and the minutes they spent on the court”
NZZ | A visual portrait of snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov
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
Wired | ‘Study: body mapping reveals emotions are felt in the same way across cultures’
Computing Now | ‘A snapshot of current trends in visualisation’
FastCo Design | ‘The 17 Most Amazing User Interfaces Of The Year’
New York Times | ‘Makeover for maps’: Interview with Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck about how he is “trying to rethink how data is presented”.
Tow Center | ‘Making Data More Familiar with Concrete Scales’
FILWD | ‘The myth of the aimless data explorer’
Scientific American | Jen Christiansen describes how she “reconciled my love for art and science”
HBR | Kate Crawford discusses the ‘hidden biases in big data’
Slate | ‘Basketball, Football, and Hockey Are All the Same Game: What big data can teach us about our favorite sports’
Microsoft Research | ‘A Survey on Information Visualization: Recent Advances and Challenges’
Arxiv | Michael Friendly presents the ‘Golden Age of Statistical Graphics’, framing developments between 1850 and 1900 (ish)
Tableau | Jewel Loree tells everyone: ‘Why I blog and you should too’
EagerEyes | Robert’s annual ‘The State of Information Visualization’ for 2014
Futurearth | ‘Data visualization for science: the next frontier?’
EagerEyes | Robert starts off a five-part series on peer review in visualisation with a takedown of the much-discussed ‘quiltplot’
Simply Statistics | A response to the hate aimed at the quiltplot
FILWD | Enrico on ‘The Role of Algorithms in Data Visualization’
If We Assume | Discussing findings from an exploration into the ‘Readability of Tweets and their Geographic Correlation with Education’
VizNinja | Paul’s latest ‘2 minutes with…’ interview series, this with Kelly Martin of VizCandy
Michael Babwahsingh | Michael makes an appeal for a change in the conversation – “spending less time curating conversations and more time getting hands dirty in sensemaking” (paraphrasing)
Perceptual Edge | Bryan steps in for Stephen and discusses a redesign of one of Bill Gates’ favourite graphs
PJIM | ‘Visual Storytelling at the Graphics Department of The New York Times, by Sergio Pecanha’
Medium | ‘What The Longform Backlash Is All About: Taking the best of the magazine craft online. And leaving the rest on paper’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Source | Behind the scenes design narrative of the New York Times digital re-design
Juice Analytics | ‘Reading Visualizations for Beginners’
Data to Display | ‘Communicating changes in rank over time: bumps charts and slopegraphs’
Policy Viz | ‘To Slope Chart or Not to Slope Chart?’
Nature Graphics | Dissecting the design challenge of presenting one million deaths on two pages
Junk Charts | Discussing ‘Losing the big picture’ – “you should focus less on comprehensiveness and focus more on highlighting the good data”
Richard Bedford | A case study to demonstrate using GIS for the uncovering of stories in data
Kutosis | ‘Tables, charts, paragraphs and narratives: We need to be both Type-A analysts and Type-B analysts’
Peter Smart | ‘It’s time to… Rethink the airline boarding pass’
Flowing Data | Need help to get your head around mapping projections… ‘Map projections illustrated with a face’
Knight Lab | ‘Behind the dialect map interactive: How an intern created The New York Times’ most popular piece of content in 2013’
Work Made for Hire | ‘How to Tell A Client How Much Something Costs’
Design Notes | Discussing the design process for working with Dataminr
School of Data | ‘Tutorial: Data Visualisation for Print’
Sociable Physics | ‘Data visualisation programming: a recap’
DataVizCatalogue | ‘The Data Visualisation Catalogue: Helping you display your data…’
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Visual Complexity | New Book: “The Book of Trees”, by Manuel Lima, available for pre-order
Graphical Web | ‘Call for Participation’ open for 3rd edition of the Graphical Web Conference
Amiando | Tickets now on sale for the Information Design Conference 2014, 7-8 April
VUDlab | ‘The Visualizing Urban Data Idealab (VUDlab) is a student-led organization formed at University of California-Berkeley’ with a mission ‘to yield research insights and assist decision-makers who confront the problems facing modern cities.’
VB News | ‘Chartio grabs $2.2M for simple but powerful data visualization’
UK Data Service | Newly discovered site: “The UK Data Service is a comprehensive resource funded by the ESRC to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data.”
Knight Foundation | Profiling the 24 projects that will receive new funding from the Knight Foundation
Google | ‘New Google Sheets: faster, more powerful, and works offline’
Guardian | ‘UK government plans switch from Microsoft Office to open source’
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
Designboom | Article profiling a visit to BIG architects new lofted/industrial studio in the district of valby, in the southwestern area of Copenhagen. Always interesting to peer behind the curtain at studios like this!
The Atlantic | ‘How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood’
Twitter | Graphically revealing how Luis Suarez posed questions for the Hull defence…
Creative Review | Breaking down the thinking behind the new logo for ‘Made in Britain’
BBC News | ‘The map that saved the London Underground’
Transom | Profiling Jonathan Harris’ manifesto titled ‘Navigating Stuckness’ described as ‘an autobiographical journey with teachable moments, following Jonathan’s path as a diarist, painter, storyteller, data artist, web visionary, etc’
BBC | ‘Presenting a warm front: 60 years of the British TV weather forecast’
See Your Folks | Calculating how many more times you will see your parents based on current visiting patterns.
EagerPies | ‘Pie in the Sky: The Dream of Big Data’
Twitter | ‘Guideline-poster for the illustrators of The Simpsons’
Wimp | ‘News report from 1981 about the Internet’
Twitter | 3D popup dataviz
FastCo Design | ‘Why Visa is Sick of Gold’
Slate | ‘Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.’