BLOG POSTS

Visualisingdata.com was originally launched in 2010 originally to serve as a blog to help continue the momentum of my learning from studying the subject via a Masters degree. I continue to publish articles and share announcements that track developments in my professional experiences as well as developments in the data visualisation field at large.

This is a collection of all my published posts, starting with the newest and dating back to 2010, tracking. These posts include articles, design commentaries, podcast updates, professional updates, and general news from across the data visualisation field.

External

Article for the OECD Better Life Index blog

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article for the OECD’s Better Life Index blog and it was just published yesterday. It’s not a groundbreaking piece of work but frames a discussion about the success of the Better Life Index project that many of you will already be familiar with.

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Articles

Talk slides: NYC data visualisation meetup

Last night I had the privilege of talking at the New York Data Visualisation meetup event, hosted by the good people at McKinsey. This was based on a similar talk I gave in London last week as part of the ‘IDA talks’ series. The talk was titled ‘Opposites Attract: The Art and Science of Data Visualisation’.

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Articles

Video: ‘The Art of Data Visualization’

Published yesterday comes the newest episode of the PBS ‘Off Book’ series in the form of a nice video titled “The Art of Data Visualization”, a subject close to the topic of some of my recent talks.

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Articles

Guest post: Infographics and the mainstream media

his is a guest post from Ben Harrow, Digital Editor at 72Point and at News by Design, a news site built around infographics – a platform that shows off infographics that tell a newsworthy story in a structured and visually dynamic way.

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Design

Smell Maps: Beyond the visualisation of data

In my most recent ’10 most significant blah blah blah’ posts at the end of last year I included (at number 8) examples of where designers were going beyond solely the visual representation of data. Some of these examples included Moritz’ Data Cuisine Workshop, experiments like Tasty Tweets and fun pieces like Pumpkin Pie Charts.

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Field News

Introducing Big Dive EU 2013

Last year I had the pleasure of taking part (in a very small way!) in the Big Dive EU, an intensive 5 week training program based in Turin, Italy aimed at boosting a new generation of data scientists and visualisation developers.

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Articles

St Helena: Big Data on a Small Island

This is a guest post from Dr Paula McLeod who has one of the most interesting jobs (and challenges!) I’ve heard of for a long time. In September of 2012 Paula was appointed as statistician for St. Helena on a two-year fixed term contract.

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Best Ofs

Best of the visualisation web… March 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 March 2013.

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Articles

Guest post: Using Silk for simple data visualisations

I’m in the midst of inviting a few folks to contribute guest posts to profile their work, ideas or knowledge. This guest post comes from Jurian Baas of Silk, who explains how you can use his tool to create and publish simple data visualisations.

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Field News

Quadrigram: Beyond visualisation as a scientific instrument

Having written this week about storytelling and successes of data visualisation, it was a coincidence that Alberto Gonzalez Paje, from the Quadrigram team, got in touch with me recently to invite people to contribute cases to a new initiative they are running called ‘data stories’ and a request for anybody interested to submit ideas, case studies, examples or applications.

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Articles

Interview with Simon Scarr

Simon Scarr is an extremely talented infographics designer and, until very recently, was the Graphics director at The South China Morning Post based in Hong Kong. He is about to take up a great new role as Deputy Head of Graphics for Thomson Reuters, based in Singapore.

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Articles

Discussion: Storytelling and success stories

I’ve not been able to keep up with all threads but it seems there have been a number of interesting discussions over the past few days covering various aspects of the role of data visualisation and what we should expect from it.

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Announcements

Data visualisation training in Australasia and India?

This is a very specific request for anyone potentially interested in my data visualisation training courses in Australia, New Zealand and India. As I start to shape up my next set of training locations I wanted to actively seek input from folks located in these parts of the world.

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Field News

1578 responses to the first data visualisation census!

The data visualisation census data collection exercise for 2013 is completed. After seven days, endless prompts (sorry, that is over now!) and 1578 responses we have captured our first dataset to potentially get a sense of the shape, size and participation of the data visualisation field in 2013

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Design

Visual Sedimentation: Twitter’s favourite M&M colours

Thanks to Romain Vuillemot for sharing a really interesting visualization toolkit he has developed with Samuel Huron called Visual Sedimentation (VisualSedimentation.js), a JavaScript library for visualising streaming data, inspired by the process of physical sedimentation.

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Field News

Are you interested in data visualisation?

Are you interested in data visualisation? A very open question but given you are reading this post the chances are you are. Whether you only occasionally read blogs, are a full-time professional, or fall somewhere in between, it doesn’t matter – you are a key part of this field’s ecosystem.

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Announcements

Changes to RSS feed

As most have you have probably read by now, Google is shutting down its popular feed reader Google Reader. For those of us who consume updates from our favourite sites this was a really simple and unfussy tool and it is an annoyance to see it going.

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Best Ofs

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.

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External

Summary of my ‘All Analytics Academy’ session

Beth Schultz has done a sound job of encapsulating some of the key take-aways from last week’s ‘All Analytics Academy’ session I took part in, specifically focusing on some of the key objectives for visualisation design I spoke about.

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Design

New work from Interactive Things: Fukushima

In the last hour or so, Benjamin Wiederkehr and his talented crew at Interactive Things have shared work they were involved in for Swiss German-language newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The project is titled ‘No time for anger’ and looks at four stories two years on from the Fukushima disasters.

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Design

Dumb charts just got dumber

There is never a short supply of dumb charts, particularly thanks to the totemic uselessness of outlets like Fox news. However, sometimes you see an example that leaves you quite frozen with fascination: How did it come to be? What were they thinking? How many people let this pass through the approval for usage?

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Design

Tactile visualisations: Inuit wood maps

A theme of steadily increasing interest to me and many others in the field right now is the ideal of physical data visualisation. Not just visual sculptures as data art but actual tactile representations of data that maintain and offer function.

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