Barely a map of the west coast

Barely Maps is an ongoing project by Peter Gorman that shows geographic data as barely a map. Gorman strips away almost all context to the edge before being too abstract to comprehend. The above is… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Scrolly video JavaScript library

ScrollyVideo.js is a JavaScript library that makes it easier to incorporate videos in a scrollytelling layout. The examples look really straightforward, which means I’m saving this for later. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Snow cover mapped using snowflakes

To show snow cover across the United States, Althea Archer for the USGS used hexbins, but instead of hexbins, she used snowflakes. Archer provided her R code and outlined her process in a blog post… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Tracking hundreds of pizza slices

For eight years, Liam Quigley tracked every slice of pizza he ate in New York City, which added up to 454 slices. Quigley did not rate the slices to “avoid controversy and bribes”, but … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Alternative Ways to Represent Data

We've seen data in many forms, but we should dig deeper into using our other senses.Tags: senses | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Happiness and Meaning

There there are things that make us happy. There are things where we find meaning in the everyday. What are the things that give us both?Tags: time use, well-being | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Origins of the world map

Mapping the entire planet is not exactly a straightforward thing to do, especially during a time when there weren’t any flying objects to take photographs from above. Jeremy Shuback rewinds a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Tom Brady of other jobs

Tom Brady, the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is 45 years old, which makes him the oldest player in the National Football League. Francesca Paris, for NYT’s The Upshot, places Brad… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Bias in AI-generated images

Lensa is an app that lets you retouch photos, and it recently added a feature that uses Stable Diffusion to generate AI-assisted portraits. While fun for some, the feature reveals biases in the und… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Generative AI trade-offs

People have been having fun with generative AI lately. Enter a prompt and get a believable body of text, or enter descriptive text and get a photorealistic image. But as with all things that are fu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Every hour tracked, for five years

In the department of tedious and thorough, Reddit user _tsweezy_ tracked every hour of his life for five years. It’s like a personal American Time Use Survey diary for slightly longer than a … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

When Americans Are Happiest

What people are doing when they are happy and not, from age 20 to 70.Tags: happiness, time use, well-being | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Animal extinction over time

Animals are going extinct at a faster rate. Reuters shows a developing pattern across species: Losing hundreds of species over 500 or so years may not seem significant when there are millions more … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Names that are more dog or more human

There appears to be a trend of using human names for pets. Alyssa Fowers and Chris Alcantara, for WP’s Department of Data, asked the natural questions that come after: “How human is you… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Mapping the sea floor

Jon Keegan on how USGS researchers collected data for 125 square miles of sea floor: In 2004 and 2005, two research vessels, Ocean Explorer and Connecticut set off into the waters off Cape Ann, Mas… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, December 2022 Roundup

The year's almost up, so let's get right into it. Here's the good stuff for December.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2022

Every year, I pick my favorite data visualization projects, which tend to cover a wide range of purposes but are typically for presentation. Here are my favorites for 2022.Tags: best-of | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Southwest flight cancellations

There were a lot of flight cancellations this week, but Southwest Airlines is on another level. This straightforward chart by Matt Stiles for CNN says it all. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Apply your daylight saving preferences to the rest of the country

We like to complain about changing time an hour back or forward, and usually it’s in the context of our own geography. Maybe one area gets a lot of later sunsets, but then another gets much l… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Inevitably super rich

Sometimes it feels like a foregone conclusion that most of the money ends up with a small percentage of people. Alvin Chang, for The Pudding, describes the Yard-sale model, which shows how such a s… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Finding the Point

Visualization for the sake of visualization is a drag and fleeting. Find purpose for your work.Tags: meaning, purpose | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Lord of the Rings and Santa Venn diagram

Kaitlyn Facista, of Tea with Tolkien, made a four-part Venn diagram that shows the intersection between Gandalf, Dark Lord Sauron, and Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings and Santa Claus. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Visual exploration through emotional granularity

We often talk about emotions in more basic terms, such as disgust, joy, sadness, and anger, but of course it goes deeper than that. When talking to others, it helps to have the words to express the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Carbon footprint in the city versus the suburbs

Bringing it down the Census tract level, Nadja Popovich, Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer, for The New York Times, mapped emission estimates so you can see the impact of your neighborhood: A map of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

VIS 2022 talks are online

With the holidays just about here, I’m sure there’s nothing you’d rather do more than listen to hours of visualization research talks from VIS 2022. Lucky for you: all the talks a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

xkcd on optimal bowling metrics

xkcd charted optimal bowling in terms of aim, speed, spin, and weight. This…Tags: bowling, humor, xkcd | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Stable Diffusion to generate spectrograms to convert to sounds

Stable Diffusion is an AI model that lets you enter text to generate images. Spectrograms visually represent sound. Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros combined the two for Riffusion, which lets you en… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Mistaken Error

That can't be for real, right? Right? A basic chart is not quite what it seems.Tags: error, mistake | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

One home’s blackouts in Kyiv

Volodymyr Agafonkin and his family live in Kyiv, Ukraine. He visualized when the power went out over the past two months: As you can see, we spend 4–8 hours in blackout during a typical day. You ca… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Conway’s Game of Life in infinite space

Conway’s Game of Life is a zero-person game where cells in a grid live or die based on a simple set of rules. You set the initial state and the cells change accordingly. Life Universe by saha… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Bodybuilder risks

The human body has its limits, so many bodybuilders take steroids to increase those limits to build bigger muscles. Bonnie Berkowitz and William Neff, for The Washington Post, used a combination of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Information Graphic Visionaries delivered

Visualization still seems like a relatively new thing, but it has a history that goes back a few centuries. The Information Graphic Visionaries book series celebrates this history with a profile of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Gifts my true love gave to me over the 12 days of Christmas

From Reddit user neilrkaye. This is very important.…Tags: humor, song | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Perfect seasons needed to get over .500 overall

Here’s a fun one from Philip Bump for The Washington Post. Bump simply asks how many wins it would take for sports franchises to reach a .500 record over the life of the franchise. The histor… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Scratching Projects

Sometimes it's not worth finishing what you start.Tags: scratch | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Life cycle of coronavirus at the molecular level

From Maastricht University: What happens if a SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus enters your lung? This molecular animation visualises how the virus particle can take over the host cell and turns it into a vir… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Tour through the greatest movies of all time

Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound, a British film magazine, has asked critics to list the greatest movies of all time. The magazine announced the results from the 2022 poll. There was a c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Digital face aging with neural network

Disney Research demonstrates their use of neural networks to seamlessly age and de-age someone’s face across a continuous range. Sure what is real anymore anyway. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Asteroid simulator for before the big one hits

Knowing the impact of an asteroid falling in your city might not seem immediately relevant, but if there’s one headed toward Earth and NASA is unable to knock it off course with one of their … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Who pays for Twitter

Twitter Blue is a subscription service from Twitter that primarily provided premium features like link aggregation and tweet editing. However, after the acquisition, the service primarily let peopl… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Retrofitting old British homes to improve energy efficiency

Speaking of old homes and energy efficiency in the UK, The Economist describes renovations that can help reduce energy usage, which is of heightened interest to the British government because it… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Managing temperature fluctuations through UK architecture

Philip Kennicott, Simon Ducroquet, Frank Hulley-Jones and Aaron Steckelberg, for The Washington Post, tour the evolution of UK architecture and temperature control: Last summer, staff members at Ha… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, November 2022 Roundup

Here's the good stuff for November.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Upward mobility through a personal lens

Aaron Williams, for The Pudding, shows upward mobility through his own experiences, moving as a child from a low-income city to a higher-income city. It’s unclear what my mom meant by “better… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

On the Data Journalism Podcast

I had a short chat with Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers on The Data Journalism Podcast. They talk to people about data journalism. It’s a podcast. Thanks to Alberto and Simon for having me and… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Illustration of ranked-choice voting

Connie Hanzhang Jin and Kaitlyn Radde, for NPR, used illustrations to explain how ranked-choice voting works. Instead of picking a single candidate, you can rank your choices, and if someone does n… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Republican and Democrat follower counts on Twitter

You might have heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter, and among the many recent changes to the platform comes what appears to be an ideology shift. Gerrit De Vynck, Jeremy B. Merrill and Luis Melgar,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Building a happy life, interpreted through data

How to Build a Happy Life from The Atlantic is a podcast on finding happiness: In our pursuit of a happy life, we build, we structure, and we plan. Often, we follow conventional wisdom and strategi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago