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

Depth of the underwater Tonga volcano

Mark Doman and Alex Palmer, for ABC News, show the depth of the Tonga volcano that erupted earlier this year with a 3-D model. “While the depth of the caldera shocked him, the fact the rest o… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Experimental Noisycharts sonifies data for improved accessibility

Nick Evershed, for The Guardian, describes Noisycharts, an experimental component for their in-house charting tool: What does rising global carbon dioxide sound like? Or the crash of the pound? How… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Decline of key changes in popular music

Chris Dalla Riva analyzed key changes in songs that made the Billboard Hot 100, between 1958 and 2022. Key changes are near non-existent after 2010. The most interesting part is why: Thus, if you c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Shifts in European energy sources

Mira Rojanasakul, for The New York Times, dug into current and historical energy sources in Europe. With the war in Ukraine, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to other countries, but based on est… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

$300b World Cup seen through satellite imagery

Qatar spent $300 billion with a ‘b’ over the past twelve years to host the World Cup. For Bloomberg, Simone Foxman, Adveith Nair, and Sam Dodge show what that money went towards through… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Setting Axis Ranges

Set the scales to highlight the changes in the data without abandoning the accuracy of the data.Tags: axes, range | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

All the parts of daily life in India controlled by Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Ambani has an estimated net worth of $90.7 billion, because his company controls many facets of Indian daily life: Ambani’s wealth comes from the enormous Reliance Industries conglomerate. S… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

8 billion population visualized

Here’s a fun interactive from The Washington Post to earmark the world reaching 8 billion population. Enter age, country, and gender and you get a mosaic of quarter-circles, each representing… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

New Visualization in R Course, and Other Updates

I have two course-related updates on FlowingData. First, there’s a new course on visualizing data with R. Second, I updated the Visualization for Clarity course so that you can more easily ge… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Sleuthing for birth dates, with just TikTok profiles as clue

TikTok user notkahnjunior figures out people’s birth dates through the psuedo-privacy of the internet. People give her their TikTok profile, and she takes it from there. @notkahnjunior Replyi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Role of luck in football wins

NFL Football Operations calculated how much luck has contributed to team wins and losses this season. They considered four actions that involve a lot of randomness: dropped interceptions, dropped p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Exports through the Mississippi River

Drought has caused water levels to drop in the Mississippi River, which is a problem when millions of tons of grain are moved for export via boat. Bloomberg Green breaks it down, including a flow-i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Deleting your tweets with R

Twitter isn’t in a great place right now, so maybe you want to do something with your account and your tweets. Julia Silge outlines how to delete your tweets with R: If you are looking to rem… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Using Visualization Feedback

The process of taking in visualization feedback to improve towards where you want to go.Tags: criticism, feedback | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Life Satisfaction and Age

These life satisfaction scores might make you want to rethink life.Tags: age, time use, well-being | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Dashboard Design Patterns

Dashboards aren’t really my thing, but we’ve seen, especially over the past few years, that a quick view of data that is checked regularly for a current status can be useful in some con… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

History of wars and power in Europe, animated from 1500 to present

Agar.io is a multiplayer game where people control cells in a Petri dish-type environment. The animation above used the same visual metaphor to show power and war in Europe, from 1500 to 2022. Circ… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Chance of rain and election turnout

There’s rain in the forecast tomorrow in some areas of the United States, which is worth noting because tomorrow is election day. Eve Washington and John Keefe, for The New York Times, picked… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

AI-based image generation ethics

AI-based image generation is having a moment. Time some text and you can get a piece of art that resembles the style of your favorite artist. However, there’s an ethical dilemma with the sour… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Procedurally generated driving game

Sometimes you need to slow down and go on a drive with no destination. Slow Roads by anslo is a procedurally generated game that lets you do that. Choose the scene, the road complexity, the weather… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ The Process of Choosing the Better Chart

This is how I pick charts.Tags: chart types | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Daylight saving time and circadian rhythms

Daylight saving time ends in the United States this weekend and ended already in other places. This can only mean one thing, which is that we must hem and haw about whether to shift our clocks or n… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

How you might vote based on what you like

By Angie Waller, this table shows how Facebook thinks you’ll vote based on what you like. It’s a straightforward view that’s fun to look at. In particular, I like the excluded aud… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

What hearing loss sounds (and looks) like

Using an audiogram as a backdrop, Amanda Morris and Aaron Steckelberg, for The Washington Post, explain what hearing loss sounds and looks like. Hearing level, or volume, is on the vertical axis, a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Election ad topics

Midterm election day is just about here in the U.S., so the political ads are running. Harry Stevens and Colby Itkowitz, for The Washington Post, show the spending breakdown by political party and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Gas prices and confidence

Everywhere you go, gas prices show up on big boards, like a proxy measurement for the times. When gas prices are really low, something exciting is happening, and in my case when I was a teen, your … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, October 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Feelings at Work

We spend a lot of time working. It seems worth thinking about how we feel during all those hours.Tags: time use, well-being, work | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Geographic misconceptions about the location of continents

When you’re used to looking at the world through a certain lens, such as a certain rectangular geographic projection, your mental model tends to mirror the view. John Nelson goes over a handf… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Luxury surveillance

Chris Gilliard, for The Atlantic, describes self-surveillance that people pay for in exchange for small conveniences at the expense of privacy: The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Educational statistics illustrations

Allison Horst often illustrates data science concepts and tools with anthropomorphized shapes and animals. She recently cataloged her illustrations, which are open source and entertaining if you ar… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Word cloud + Streamgraph = WordStream

I hear it all the time from chart purists. “I love the streamgraph!” and “Word clouds are the best!” and “I wish there was an easy way to combine a streamgraph and wor… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ The Process of Finding Data

You need data to visualize. Luckily, it's not too complicated.Tags: data, finding | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Slow internet for the same price as fast internet

When you pay for internet, it seems like a reasonable expectation that if you pay the same monthly rate as someone a few blocks from you, you get a similar speed. This is commonly not always the ca… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

All the elections where you live

We tend to talk about elections as this uniform thing. People vote for some other people. But who we vote for, who we vote with, and when we vote for who varies depending on where you look. USAFact… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Less rich Covid billionaires

With Covid came sudden shifts in daily life and work, which gave rise to certain companies that were able to fill specific needs. Some individuals’ net worth increased many times over. But as… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Chartball is sports data visualized in a playful way

With Chartball, Andrew Garcia Phillips has been visualizing sports data for a while publishing to various mediums — Twitter, Tumblr, posters, and YouTube — showing animated and engaging… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Algorithmic rent increase

It’s growing more common for landlords to use software to set the rental prices of their properties. This of course leads to software companies promising optimized pricing for maximum profit,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Linear regression visual explainer

MLU-Explain continues with their visual explainers for machine learning and statistical concepts. Most recently, Jared Wilber gets into linear regression. Towards the bottom of the explainer, there… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Getting Better at Making Charts

There's always room for improvement — no matter how long you've been at it.Tags: evolution | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Introduction to Data Science, an open source book

Introduction to Data Science, by Harvard biostatistics professor Rafael A. Irizarry, is an open source book that provides, as you might have guessed, an introduction to data science: The demand for… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Impossible or improbable lottery results

There was a government-run lottery in the Philippines with a $4 million jackpot, and two improbable things happened. First, the numbers selected were all multiples of nine: 9, 45, 36, 27, 18, and 5… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Good Country Index

The Good Country Index is an effort to highlight and rank the countries that are doing good for the rest of the world. Select the metrics that are pertinent to you, and the ranks adjust accordingly… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Future monsoon patterns

The monsoon season in South Asia brings water to the people and land, but signs point to more intense rain as overall temperatures go up. To show the change in rain, Zach Levitt and Jeremy White, f… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Difficulties reading the cone of uncertainty

It seems that there is always surprise when a hurricane makes landfall in some areas, which some attribute to poor forecast communication with the cone on a map that shows possible paths. Scott Dan… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

China’s fishing patterns shift globally

China’s fish supply is running low along its own coast, so they’ve shifted their fishing activities globally. The New York Times visualized the shift with animated maps. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Fun with Limitations

Create boundaries in your work for focus and depth.Tags: limitations | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago