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 2014.
Visualisations/Infographics
Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.
National Climate Assessment | Some nice graphics across this report: “Explore highlights and the full report of the National Climate Assessment”
Moebio | Santiago creates a whole new way of looking at the world wide web via a trace of site links over time “The First Web, and Beyond”
ONS | Slopegraph showing ranking relationship between countries and their number of visits to UK and the spending per day of visitors from those countries in 2013
New Yorker | Interactive and video exploring the most radioactive place in New York City
Guardian | ‘Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights around the world’
Vizual-Statistix | ‘A career shooting percentages of every NBA player’
WSJ | Long form piece from the WSJ exploring the phenomena of Alibaba, China’s biggest online commerce company
mdaniels | Examining the vocabulary of hip hop artists based on the number of unique words used within artist’s first 35000 lyrics
Smartmine | Who wouldn’t want to watch tracking data for whales? This tool lets you “follow sperm, beaked, false killer, and pigmy killer whales as they migrate around the Hawaiian Islands” (love the Ocean view especially)
Australian Financial Review | My friends at Small Multiples did this really nice interactive to explore language used by the current and previous Treasurers to explain their budgets
Washington Post | ‘The most lethal actors of all time, by number of career kills on screen’
CartoDB | Animated map showing the geotagged tweets mentioning Arsenal or Hull City during the FA Cup final in May
New York Times | ‘Rating a Health Law’s Success’ – with a sequence of slopegraphs. Yes!
BigtimeBCN | More ‘Age of a city’ goodness, this time for Barcelona
Forum | Infographic showing how Africa tweets
CS 171 | Always look forward to the publication of the Harvard ‘CS 171 – Visualization’ course end of year best student visualisation projects gallery
LA Times | Take a video-flyover across the LA area showing the updated location of the earthquake fault zones routes.
Urban Demographics | 3D projections that show ‘Urban Density Patterns in 9 Global Cities’
Lincolnmullen | Animated map that shows the spread of US slavery between 1790 and 1860
The Upshot | ‘Which Team to you Cheer For?’ a map of NBA fans across the US
The Upshot | Music to my ears, or eyes, as this graphic comprehensively shows how Liverpool were robbed of the Premier League title – ‘The Premier League Standings if Only Goals by English Players Counted’
Andreapinchi | ‘No Country for Young Men’ – analysis of the age of Italian Parliament members
Darkhorse Analytics | ‘Breathing City’ Joey takes a look at Manhattan’s population who are at home or at work, by hour
Guardian | Profiling the animated mapping project by CASA to look at the evolution of London’s 2000 year history
Seventeenpeople | ‘A modest tribute to – and deconstruction of – my favourite hour of television’ – an ode to Aaron Sorkin
Retale | ’13 Years of Apple Stores in 60 Seconds’
Vimeo | Discovered via Jer Thorp’s datastories episode. This is a video of actors reading the most common first names for artists in MOMA’s accessioned collection, in order, by gender (hint: listen for the occasional female speakers)
Prooffreader | ‘Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words’
Slavery Footprint | ‘How many slaves work for you?’
FastCo Design | ‘Falling In Love, Visualize’ – work by Lam Thuy Vo using text message data to visualize the sparks of love
Washington Post | ‘Weapons and mass shootings’ – chart showing every gun that was used in a mass shooting and how those guns were obtained.
SCMP | An incredible attempt to portray the hugely complex issue of the conflicts in the waters between China and Vietnam.
New York Times | ‘A New Story Told at Ground Zero: The National September 11 Memorial Museum’
The Upshot | ‘Is It Better to Rent or Buy?’
The Atlantic | ‘The World of Starbucks, Mapped’ [+ subtitle of the month: “No matter where you are on the planet, you’re never more than 5,000 miles from a Starbucks.”]
Washington Post | Connected Scatterplot showing how ‘Inequality and political polarization have been rising in tandem for three decades’
Flowing Data | Analysis of ‘Where Bars Outnumber Grocery Stores’
Washington Post | A scatter-plot showing the best and worst ceremonial first pitches (showing that 50 Cent’s was possibly the worst)
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
Int3rhacktives | An interview with data visualiser Ri Liu from Pitch Interactive
Periscopic | Dino discusses the issue that data – and what data is or isn’t – is a point of view.
GiorgiaLupi | ‘Bellas Razones [Beautiful Reasons]’ A super Italian/English article by Giorgia sharing the approach Accurat take to balance their aesthetic and practical choices across their portfolio of work (based on her Visualized talk of 2014)
YouTube | ‘CHI Belgium Hangouts with interesting people: Moritz Stefaner’
New York Times | ‘The United States of Metrics’
Junk Charts | Nice piece by Kaiser discussing ‘how effective visualisation brings data alive’
JSK | Shazna Nessa discusses ‘how journalists can turn raw information into data visualizations that are both appealing and understandable to real people’
Ghostweather | A great article by Lynn, offering a second-part to her discussion about Implied Stories.
Scientific American | When an article begins with ‘Andy Kirk…’ and has ‘clever’ in the same sentence then there’s a good chance I’m going to be loving it! (It is a really nice piece by Jen looking ‘Under the Hood of Online Data Visualization’)
Nieman Journalism Lab | ‘The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age’
Ampp3d | ’11 mistakes that will drive data nerds crazy’
Source | Lovely article by one of my favourite people in viz – Sarah Slobin – as she ‘discovers that all the facts and numbers didn’t add up to the humans in her story’
BBC Internet Blog | ‘To mark 20 years of the BBC being online, we wanted to see if there was a way of representing the growth and changing shape of the site over the last 20 years.’
OpenVisConf | A beautiful way to break down and share the videos from the OpenVisConf 2014 (My ‘The Design of Nothing’ is in there…)
Simon Rogers | ‘Data journalism needs to go mobile’
Tow Center | Report: ‘The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism’
Michael Babwahsingh | Michael discusses how rarely ‘information design acknowledges the missing, the unknown’
The Functional Art | Yes >> ‘Infographics that just work better on paper’
Aeon | Quite a long article looking at the relationship between truth and beauty. Some Operators in particular may find this interesting.
SND | ‘Infographic case study: Boston Globe’s energetic interactive and print graphics’
Policy Viz | Jon shares his thoughts on the ‘So What?’ test as introduced by Alberto in the Datastories episode 35
Gravy Anecdote | Continuing the recent discussions about storytelling, Andy Cotgreave challenges some of the views (of Moritz in particular) from the same episode 35
Juice Analytics | Great message: ’10 Ways to Reduce to Improve Your Data Visualizations’
Utah.edu | Paper: ‘Reflections on How Designers Design With Data’
Contently | Interview with Bloomberg Visual’s leader, Lisa Strausfeld
Source | ‘Distrust your data: Jacob Harris on Six Ways to Make Mistakes with Data’
Learning & Development
These links cover presentations, tutorials, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.
Perceptual Edge | Nice summary from Stephen about some of the methods of displaying change between two points in time – such a frequent task
Sankeymatic | Tool: SankeyMATIC – a Sankey diagram builder built in d3.js
tylervigen | Loads and loads and loads of brilliant charts that show some spurious correlations eg. Number people who drowned in a swimming pool correlates with the number of films Nicolas Cage has been in. Obviously.
Sorting | ‘An attempt to visualise and help to understand how some of the most famous sorting algorithms work.’
Medium | A write up of ‘Experiences & insights from a course by Jonathan Corum, Bret Victor, Mike Bostock & Edward Tufte’
GiorigaLupi | Another great contribution for Giorgia this month, this time a nice project narrative from Accurat’s work on ‘The Life Cycle of Ideas’ for Popular Science
Well Formed Data | Moritz outlines some of the updated features of the Better Life Index 2014
Source | Project narrative by Alastair Dant and Hannah Fairfield as they discuss the work behind the scenes of their ‘Few Helmets, More Deaths’ project
Mic | ‘9 Things You’d Believe About World Geography if You Only Listened to Fox News’
Evergreen Data | Great work by Stephanie and Ann Emery to create a data visualisation creation checklist
Storytelling With Data | Really useful article from Cole, ‘the story you want to tell…and the one your data shows’
Stamen | ‘Stamen’s Checklist for Maps’ – Here’s another super useful checklist, but this more narrowly focused on maps
Collossal | ‘The Cyanometer, a 225-Year-Old Tool for Measuring the Blueness of the Sky’
Caroline Beavon | A long article by Caroline about infographics, making them accessible and many other design considerations
Subject News
Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.
Global Editors Network | Announcing the nine winners of the Data Journalism Awards 2014
Journalism | ‘BBC to launch daily infographics shared on social media’
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
Guardian | ‘Second world war in Google Street View’ – overlaying photos from the second world war
Twitter | Useful little explainer for the difference between Type I and Type II errors.
Collossal | ‘271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book’
The Creators Project | ‘This Is What The Internet Sounds Like’ – audio of different big data centres
FastCo Create | R.I.P HR Giger
FastCo Design | R.I.P. Massimo Vignelli
Wired | ‘400 Years of Beautiful, Historical, and Powerful Globes’
NPR | ‘The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever’ – Over 300 searchable addresses going back to 1774
Slash Film | ‘Every Word In Star Wars Sorted Alphabetically’
Guardian | ‘World Cup kits through the ages – interactive guide’
xkcd | “Someone is wrong on the internet.”
Business Insider | ‘Inside The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet’
Twitter | “We are becoming rational, analytical, and data-driven in a far wider range of activity than ever before”
Buzzfeed | ‘The 21 Worst Police Sketches Of All Time’
LinkedIn | ‘Error messages are evil’
Twitter | ‘Save Paper – Save The Planet ‘
New York Times | ‘What are you drinking?’ – Interactive and customised cocktail builder