Artificial intelligence, given its name, sounds like a computer learns everything its own. However, a set of algorithms can only become useful if there’s something to learn from: data. Dave L… | Continue reading
Data grows more intertwined with the everyday and more involved in important decisions. However, data is biased in many ways from collection, to analysis, and the conclusions, which is a problem wh… | Continue reading
xkcd referenced the ever-so-loved forecasting needle. I’m so not gonna look at it this year. Maybe. | Continue reading
A meme that cried “jobs not mobs” began modestly, but a couple of weeks later it found its way into a slogan used by the President of the United States. Keith Collins and Kevin Roose fo… | Continue reading
The Economist built an election model that treats demographic variables like blocks that output a probability of voting Republican or Democrat: Our model adds up the impact of each variable, like a… | Continue reading
As the midterm elections loom, the ads focusing on key issues are running in full force. Using data from Nielsen, Bloomberg mapped the issues talked about across the country. Bloomberg News analyze… | Continue reading
As one might expect, many women, people of color, and L.G.B.T. candidates are running in this year’s midterms. It’ll be one of the most diverse elections in U.S. history. The New York T… | Continue reading
Randall Munroe, Kelsey Harris, and Max Goodman for xkcd mapped all the challengers for the the upcoming midterm elections. Names are colored by political party. They are sized by the level of offic… | Continue reading
Also known as ridgeline plots, the method overlaps time series for a 3-D-ish view of the data. While perhaps not the most visually efficient, the allure is undeniable. | Continue reading
I really like what The New York Times has been doing with augmented reality lately. What usually feels gimmicky is used as a tool to provide scale and detail and to invite closer observation. In th… | Continue reading
Over the next few months, I’ll be looking more closely at the available visualization apps to see what works and what doesn’t. In this issue, I start with Flourish. | Continue reading
Shirley Wu used a tree metaphor to represent the interactions of five individuals with an SFMOMA texting service: Last June, SFMOMA launched Send Me SFMOMA, a service where individuals could text a… | Continue reading
It’s Halloween. Joshua Stevens mapped all the graveyards: Right away I was struck by the geography. The pattern, however, makes a great deal of sense in the context of American history. Some … | Continue reading
As of September 2018, there were 892 million comments for the year so far, spread out over 355,939 subreddits. Here’s how it got to this point. | Continue reading
In a time we commit less to memory and rely more on technology supplements, Nicky Case provides an interactive comic to teach the science of spaced repetition, which can be used to “remember … | Continue reading
Jen Christiansen spoke about her extensive experience as a graphics editor for Scientific American. Her talk notes span a wide range of topics from the “rules”, the spectrum of visualiz… | Continue reading
From Evogeneao: This Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and timetree.org. The smalle… | Continue reading
Hi, A couple of months ago, after almost a decade, I quietly stopped accepting sponsors, and FD now truly runs because of supporters like you. While not much changed on the surface, it has let me f… | Continue reading
Based on data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, The Washington Post mapped voter turnout on a diverging color scale. Orange represents lower than average turnout in 2016 … | Continue reading
High school seniors, in the Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, built a prediction model for the upcoming elections: Under the guidance of Mr. Dav… | Continue reading
Accurat, in partnership with the Google News Initiative, built an augmented reality app to build statues of hope: We live in a world awash with information. Every time we walk the street holding ou… | Continue reading
There are many racial disparities in education. ProPublica shows estimates for the gaps: Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive… | Continue reading
The Washington Post provides a flyover view of the barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a combination of satellite imagery, path overlays, and information panels as you scroll. It gives a… | Continue reading
As I worked on a wide range of charts recently, I got to thinking about workflow. How does one get from dataset to finished data graphic? This is my process. | Continue reading
Let’s work through a practical example to see how asking and answering questions helps guide you towards more focused data graphics. | Continue reading
When you drink bubble tea, ideally you’d like to finish with the same proportions of boba and tea that you started at. Krist Wongsuphasawat took care of the math and provides a simulator for … | Continue reading
A few months back, Microsoft released a comprehensive dataset that included the estimated footprints of all of the buildings in the United States. The New York Times mapped all of it. The footnote … | Continue reading
Based on data from the Census Bureau, National Geographic mapped predominant race in 11 million administrative regions in the United States. Many of the regions are the size of a single block. Look… | Continue reading
Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec continue on their path of Dear Data with a book that you draw in: Observe, Collect, Draw! The first section describes some of the basics of journaling with data an… | Continue reading
If the charts themselves are fairly straightforward without any dubious design choices, are you still “lying with charts” when only the data itself was manipulated? | Continue reading
Compare distributions side-by-side with a pyramid chart. Observe the change over the years by animating it. | Continue reading
As you click through the news, you can probably almost always figure out what source is loading without the URL or title. Just judge based on the layout. Noah Veltman made this overview to show how… | Continue reading
There was a survey a while back that asked people to provide a 0 to 100 percent value to probabilistic words like “usually” and “likely”. YouGov did something similar for wo… | Continue reading
This 3-D view inside Hurricane Maria, from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, lets you see the data and the lead-up to the storm in a neat 36… | Continue reading
FiveThirtyEight and The Trace investigate the uncertainty and accuracy of gun injury data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: An analysis performed by FiveThirtyEight and Th… | Continue reading
Getting into data science typically requires that you have access to a decent computer or server. You also usually need to install software. Chromebook Data Science, a set of online sources from th… | Continue reading
There’s an internet joke — Godwin’s Law — that says if an internet discussion goes long enough, the probability that someone mentions Hitler approaches a probability of 1.… | Continue reading
Opportunity Atlas, a collaboration between Opportunity Insights and the Census Bureau, is the product of ongoing research on the demographics of people, based on the neighborhood they grew up in. T… | Continue reading
The most common causes of death change as you age. They have also shifted over the years. This animation shows the details of these changes. | Continue reading
Craig Taylor from Ito World used a coral metaphor to visualize road networks in major cities around the world: For the past six months I have been fascinated by the concept of making city networks … | Continue reading
Founded by Sue Gardner, the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation and Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, journalists formerly for ProPublica, The Markup will aim to use data to help non-experts better… | Continue reading
Jeffrey Heer, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, provides an overview of building charts for analysis and exploration. It’s an iterative process between acquisition… | Continue reading
Tim Meko and Aaron Steckelberg for The Washington Post compared this summer’s rains with the average. The combination of mapping as terrain and color-encoding provides an interesting foam-loo… | Continue reading
I hope that if you’re trying to learn how to work with data that you make time to fiddle with the toys in your growing toolbox. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of bookmarks and no new skills… | Continue reading
Morph, by Datavized in collaboration with Google News, is a tool to generate abstract images from data: Morph exists to engage users in the creative expression of data without having to code. Gener… | Continue reading
While a drink a day might increase your risk of experiencing an alcohol-related condition, the change is low in absolute numbers. | Continue reading
Here’s a fun piece by Andy Bergmann that shows the timeline of Earth. It’s a long-ish, straightforward scroller that vertically spaces significant events during the history of the plane… | Continue reading
Hey, no one told me that baby name analysis was back in fashion. Dan Kopf for Quartz, using data from the Social Security Administration, describes the downfall of the name Heather. It exhibited th… | Continue reading