Throughout the month I collect new tools for data and visualization and additional resources on designing data graphics. Here’s the new stuff for November. | Continue reading
Brian Brettschneider made a joke map randomly designating the favorite pies of certain areas. While intended as a joke and a parody of past “favorite” maps, some people took it too seri… | Continue reading
The maps that we imagine as we think about locations around the world often don’t match up with reality. Betsy Mason for National Geographic explains the discrepancy. On the misalignment of E… | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute estimated the number of years lost and the number of people affected due to particulate matter in the air. They estimated pe… | Continue reading
In the spirit of the holidays, here are the tools I am most thankful for. Without them, work would be much more tedious and painful. | Continue reading
Michelle Chandra uses street data as a base for solvable mazes: I draw each maze map by hand using the real street data of cities. In keeping with the fun nature of my art, I choose iconic city lan… | Continue reading
In news graphics, blue typically represents Democrat and red represents Republican. However, the definition isn’t so clear-cut by actual party usage. Chris Alcantara for The Washington Post b… | Continue reading
Kyle McDonald describes some of the history and current research on using algorithms to generate music. On how David Cope incorporated Markov chains to aid in his work: In 1981 David Cope began wor… | Continue reading
When you go skiing or snowboarding, you get a map of the mountain that shows the terrain and where you can go. James Niehues is the man behind many of these hand-painted ski maps around the world, … | Continue reading
Newsy, Reveal and ProPublica look into rape cases in the U.S. and law enforcement’s use of exceptional clearance. The designation allows police to clear cases when they have enough evidence t… | Continue reading
The Camp fire death toll rose to 63 and 631 missing as of yesterday. The Los Angeles Times provides some graphics showing scale and the buildings that burned. Ugh. I live a few hundred miles away a… | Continue reading
Important question: Is animation in visualization even worthwhile? Well, it depends. Surprise, surprise. In this issue, I look at animation in data visualization, its uses, and how I like to think … | Continue reading
I’m behind on my podcast listening (well, behind in everything tbh), but Reply All covered the flaws of CompStat, a data system originally employed by the NYPD to track crime and hold officer… | Continue reading
Atma Mani, a geospatial engineer for ESRI, imagined shopping for a house with data, maps, and analysis. Basically, a personalized recommendation system: The type of recommendation engine built in t… | Continue reading
From Streetscapes by Zeit: Street names are stories of life. They tell us something about how the people in a given place work and live, what they believe in and their dreams. There are more than a… | Continue reading
Reading visualization research papers can often feel like a slog. As a necessity, there’s usually a lot of jargon, references to William Cleveland and Robert McGill, and sometimes perception … | Continue reading
A combination of a bivariate area chart, animation, and a population pyramid, with a sprinkling of detail and annotation. | Continue reading
Charles-Joseph Minard, best known for a graphic he made (during retirement, one year before his death) showing Napoleon’s March, made many statistical graphics over his career. The Minard Sys… | Continue reading
The Earth Puzzle by generative design studio Nervous System has no defined borders. You put it together how you want. Start anywhere and see where your journey takes you. This puzzle is based on an… | Continue reading
Election night has become quite the event for newsrooms and graphics departments over the years, and visualization production cycle has started to feel more familiar each time. | Continue reading
Ben Schmidt uses deep scatterplots to visualize millions of data points. It’s a combination of algorithm-based display and hiding of points as you zoom in and out like you might an interactiv… | Continue reading
The Guardian goes with scaled, angled arrows to show the Republican and Democrat swings in these midterms for the House compared against those of 2016. It reminds me of the classic wind-like map by… | Continue reading
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