xkcd: Curve-fitting messages

xkcd tells it like it is. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

A Day in the Life of Americans

I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Chart Components and Working On Your Graphics Piece-wise

Before you can form a set of steps to visualize data, you need to know the components of a chart that you can separate. Like making an outline for an essay, you look for sections that make sense ra… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ How to Make a Tiled Bar Chart with D3.js

Show individual data points by splitting bars into smaller cells. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Judging connectedness of American communities, based on Facebook friendships

We talk about geographic bubbles a lot these days. Some areas are isolated, in their own bubble. Other areas seem more connected. Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui for The Upshot looked at this geogra… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Watch rising river levels after Hurricane Florence

Hurricane Florence brought a lot of rain, which in turn made river levels rise. The New York Times animated the rise over a five-day period. The height of the bars represents the rise of the river … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Cuisine Ingredients

What are the ingredients that make each cuisine? I looked at 40,000 recipes spanning 20 cuisines and 6,714 ingredients to see what makes food taste different. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Changing size analogies and the trends of everyday things

When you try to describe the size of something but don’t have an exact measurement, you probably compare it to an everyday object that others can relate to. Using the Google Books Ngram datas… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Endangered species that could fit in a train car

There are endangered species where the remaining few in the world could fit on a single car train. Mona Chalabi for The Guardian imagined such a scenario. Usually when we talk about scale and putti… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

3-D view inside Typhoon Mangkhut

Typhoon Mangkhut went through the northern end of the Phillipines a few days ago. At least 25 people died. The New York Times provides a scrolling 3-dimensional view using data collected by NASA sa… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

My chat with Data Stories

I talked with Moritz and Enrico on Data Stories, my favorite visualization podcast. They’ve been providing a healthy balance between practice and research since 2012. I don’t dare liste… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Realistic storm surge depicted in Weather Channel forecast

The Weather Channel is using a realistic 3-D depiction surrounding a reporter to show what a storm surge might bring. Here, just watch it: | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Waffle House index as a storm indicator

Waffle House activated their storm center in preparation for Hurricane Florence. Their restaurants are open 24/7, so they need to keep track of which ones need to close or limit their menus. This m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Turning water pollution into audiolized awareness

Brian House collected polluted water with acid mine drainage in the Tshimologong Precinct, Johannesburg and translated pollution levels to sound: Acid Love comprises vessels of AMD gathered from a … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Google Dataset Search Impressions, the Challenges of Looking for Data, and Other Places to Find Data

Google released Dataset Search to the world last week. Some asked for my thoughts on the new tool, and as you know, ask and you shall receive.Plus, finding, gathering, and curating data is ofte… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Hurricane Florence trackers

Hurricane Florence is forecast to touch down Thursday night or Friday, and what’s become the norm, there are several ways to see where the hurricane is and where it might go. Here are a handf… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Algorithms to fix underrepresentation on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is human-edited, so naturally there are biases towards certain groups of people. Primer, an artificial intelligence startup, is working on a system that looks for people who should have a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Interactive recreation of an 1821 color guidebook

I’m always down for faux vintage, online recreations of actual vintage visualization-related things. Using scans from the real thing, Nicholas Rougeux recreated Werner’s Nomenclature of Colou… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Night lights mapped as terrain

You’ve probably seen the maps of Earth at night. It gives you a good idea of activity around the world, through the eyes of light. As an experiment and a shift in view, Jacob Wasilkowski mapp… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Visualization in the 1980s, just before the rise of computers

Graham Douglas, a data journalist at The Economist, looks back on the days when getting data and visualizing it was tedious from start to finish: But even these seemingly simple charts had their ch… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Live polling results for transparency and a way to learn about the process

In a collaboration with Siena College, The Upshot is showing live polling results. The ticker moves in real-time for every phone call. For the first time, we’ll publish our poll results and display… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Make It Mean Something or It Didn’t Happen

Visualization as template-filling content is lazy visualization that no one draws benefit from. Give people a reason to care. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Google Dataset Search now in public beta

Datasets are scattered across the web, tucked into cobwebbed corners where nobody can find them. Google Dataset Search aims to make the process easier: Similar to how Google Scholar works, Dataset … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Experience a soccer game through crowd noise

Sports visualization and analysis tends to focus on gameplay — where the players are, where the ball goes, etc. In Reimagine the Game, the focus in on crowd noise through the course of a game… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Hotter days where you were born

It’s getting hotter around the world. The New York Times zooms in on your hometown to show the average number of “very hot days” (at least 90 degrees) since you were born and then… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Counting baseball cliches

Post-game sports interviews tend to sound similar. And when you do say something out of pattern, the talk shows and the social media examine every word to find hidden meaning. It’s no wonder … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Weaponised design

When the web was relatively new, things were more of a free-for-all. Everything was an experiment, and it always felt like there were fewer consequences online, because not that many people really … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Better than Default

Defaults are generalizations to fit many datasets, which means you usually get barebone charts. For analysis, all well and good. However, data graphics for presentation require more care after the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Considering the “valuable-ness” of the things we make

Nicky Case ponders the “valuable-ness” of the things he makes as the product of the number of people reached and the average value for each person reached. Finding the balance is tricky… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Algorithmic art shows what the machine sees

Tom White is an artist who uses neural networks to draw abstract pictures of objects. What looks blobby and fuzzy to us looks more concrete to the machine. James Vincent for The Verge: That “… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ How to Make Better-Looking, More Readable Charts in R

Defaults are generalized settings to work with many datasets. This is fine for analysis, but data graphics for presentation benefit from context-specific design. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Pinball isn’t random

Pinball feels like a game of chance that is uncontrollable from any angle. In typical Vox fashion, the video explains the game and its predictability. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

A search engine for color palettes

Picular is a simple tool that lets you search for a topic, and with Google Images as source, outputs a set of colors related to your query. This is going to be a great timesaver. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Weighing the risk of moderate alcohol consumption

A research study on mortality and alcohol consumption is making the rounds. Its main conclusion is that all alcohol consumption is bad for you, because of increased risk. David Spiegelhalter, the c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

World map shows aerosol billowing in the wind

Using a mathematical model based on satellite data, NASA shows an estimate of aerosol in the atmosphere on August 23, 2018: The visualization above highlights GEOS FP model output for aerosols on A… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

3-D-Printed Time Series Plates

After seeing a 1950s physical visualization, I wondered if I could follow a similar process using modern techniques. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Charting Pitfalls, Flexible Guidelines, Exceptions to the Rules

Don’t use this chart type. That’s misleading. Make sure to only use this color scheme. That takes too long to interpret. Use this scale to show that thing. Sometimes it seems like there… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Synesthesia used to paint numbers through color

Lucy Engelman has synesthesia, which is a perceptual response where one sensory pathway is stimulated, and a secondary sense is triggered. Daniel Mullen, in collaboration with Engelman, paints what… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Visualizing the toxicity in Twitter conversations

Peter Beshai was tasked with visualizing the toxicity in Twitter conversations. He arrived at this organic-looking model using 3-D visual effects software. Nice. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

What data scientists really do

Statistics. I kid, I kid. Hugo Bowne-Anderson, host of the DataFramed podcast, culled some information together that he’s gathered from interviewing data scientists. This is what data scienti… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

World Cup play activity visualized like wind maps

A fun experiment by Neil Charles that used the aesthetics of wind maps to represent World Cup 2018 play activity: It looks like the familiar shape of an average football game, with the bulk of the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

2018 House forecast from FiveThirtyEight

Ever since the huge forecasting upset in 2016, I’ve tended to stay away from that stuff. I mean, it was painful to watch the Golden State Warriors, a huge favorite to win the championship bas… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

A visual analysis of jean pockets and their lack of practicality

Frustrated with the size of pockets on women’s pants, Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas for The Pudding, measured pocket sizes in 20 popular jean brands. They compared men’s and women’s … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

✚ Visualization Away from the Computer, Developing Ideas, Bring in the Constraints

Made-by-hand visualization has been making a mini comeback as of late, and it’s been fun to see what people do with data away from the computer.Of course, we don’t have the time to draw every c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

More wildfires than ever

Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News delves into the increasing number of wildfires in California: Most of California’s rain and snow falls in between October and March, which means that fire season pea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Scale of the California wildfires

The Mendocino Complex Fire, now the largest in California ever, continues to burn. I live a couple of hundred miles away, but the sky is yellow and orange at times, and it was smokey a few days ago… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Cartography Playground

Map-making is a tricky business with many variables to consider that can directly change how someone interprets the land and people in a location. The Cartography Playground is a simple site to tes… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Optical illusion shows our messed up lightness perception

A gray piece of paper moves along a gradient. You won’t believe your eyes. A demo of lightness perception pic.twitter.com/BSVpgcuIw1— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) August 12, 2018 | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago