K-Means clustering visually explained

Say you want to identify clusters in a scatterplot of points. K-Means is commonly used method that might get you there. Yi Zhe Ang explains how the method works with a visual and interactive essay. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Coffee versus tea in charts

Anahad O’Connor, Aaron Steckelberg and Garland Potts, for The Washington Post, made charts that compare the benefits of coffee and tea. But let’s be honest here. All we really want to see in … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Accessible visualization with Olli JavaScript library

The Olli library aims to make it easier for developers to improve the accessibility of existing charts: Olli is an open-source library for converting data visualizations into accessible text struct… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Wide range of data exploration tools

Simon Willison asked a straightforward question about the tools people use: If someone gives you a CSV file with 100,000 rows in it, what tools do you use to start exploring and understanding that … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Unemployed data scientist

It seems a lot of data scientists have either left or were laid off from their jobs during the past few months. Jacqueline Nolis and Emily Robinson, data scientists who hosted a podcast and wrote a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Tree Talk

Kelton Sears used a vertical scroll upwards to think about trees and time.…Tags: comic, Kelton Sears, time, trees | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping climate-related hazards in real-time

Bringing in data from various federal agencies: Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CMRA) integrates information from across the federal government to help people consider their local ex… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, September 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Days-since tickers for all the natural disasters

You know those signs in workplaces that keep track of days since injury? Making use of NASA APIs, Neal Agarwal used that concept to keep track of natural disasters. As of this writing, it’s b… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ How to Draw and Use Polygons in R

R provides functions for basic shapes, but you can also draw your own for maximum fun.Tags: R | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Potential storm surge flooding map

NOAA provides a map of potential flooding due to Hurricane Ian headed towards Florida. Red indicates greater than 9 feet of flooding above ground. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Trajectories of celebratory gunfire

When someone fires a gun into the air, the bullet travels thousands of feet in elevation. Gravity pulls the bullet back down, and it accelerates fast enough to penetrate a human skull by the time i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Design principles for data analysis

To teach, learn, and measure the process of analysis more concretely, Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, Roger D. Peng, and Stephanie C. Hicks explain their work in the Journal of Computational and Gra… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Historical data

Randall Munroe provides another fine observation through xkcd. I often wonder what our data and charts will look like a century or two from now. Will the conventions and aesthetics look silly and a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Maps of wildfire smoke pollution

Wildfire obviously damages the areas it comes in direct contact with, but wildfire smoke can stretch much farther. Based on research by Childs et al., Mira Rojanasakul, for The New York Times, show… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Housing market cooldown

I heard you like spiral charts when the data is seasonal. I think that’s what Kevin Schaul and Hamza Shaban, for The Washington Post, had in mind when they charted housing demand through the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Data horror stories song

Rafael Moral sang a very nerdy data analyst song, to the tune of “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies: The “Data Horror Stories Song”, inspired by a tweet by @rogierK and commissioned by @Lis… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Nonsense

If you just always assume the data is right, you'll probably finish with garbage.Tags: questions | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Developing a data design language for the World Health Organization

In a collaborative effort with UX agency Kore, Moritz Stefaner describes work with World Health Organization to develop a data design language for their evolving data collections: Deliberately desi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Climate and the San Francisco fog

A reliable dense fog in San Francisco is a defining characteristic of the city, to the delight of some and less delight to others, but the pattern of fog could be on its way out as the climate chan… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Border enforcement data collection

Drew Harwell, for The Washington Post, reporting on a growing database and who has access to the records: The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it with… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Sonic landscape of Mexico City

Aaron Reiss and Oscar Molina Palestina, for The Pudding, explore the sounds of Mexico City, focusing on the street vendors and daily life. With implementation by Michelle McGhee and illustrations b… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Oldest U.S. government

Annie Fu, Walt Hickey, and Shayanne Gal, for Insider, show the disproportionately aging government officials with a series of straightforward charts with lines moving up. You expect age across most… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Map of mega warehouses in the United States

With the growth in online shopping over the years, companies required more space to store their products, which gave rise to mega warehouses (more than 100k square feet) across the country. Judith … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Untraced orphans in Ukraine since the war

Sarah Slobin and Joanna Plucinska, for Reuters, report on the challenges of counting and tracking thousands of orphans in Ukraine who were evacuated and relocated when Russia invaded: When Russia i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Munging Around

Time spent data munging is time well spent.Tags: munging | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Serena Williams beat every Grand Slam champion

Serena Wiliams’ tennis career is impressive for its success and longevity, which are easily seen here. The Athletic compiled a list of the Grand Slam champions that Williams beat between 1991… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Choosing fonts for your charts

Changing the fonts you use for labels and annotation is one of the easiest ways to make charts more readable and less messy, which makes a chart more inviting to examine. For Datawrapper, Lisa Char… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Estimating the condition of the economy

Measuring the condition of the economy is tricky, because there are many parts to the economy. You can’t just say it’s good or bad. So Ben Casselman and Lauren Leatherby, for The New Yo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Animated charts to show sports results

Krisztina Szűcs likes to make animated charts to show sports results, from fencing, handball, soccer, to hockey. She cataloged all of her sports charts in one place. I’m partial to the triang… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Open cameras and AI to locate Instagram photos

Dries Depoorter recorded video from open cameras for a week and scraped Instagram photos. Then he used AI to identify the people in the photos and their locations. Depoorter calls it The Follower. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Emissions from fires in the Arctic

Reuters reported on the fires in the Arctic and the relatively high levels of carbon emissions they release in the atmosphere. The map above shows carbon emissions from wildfire in 2021, and the ch… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Unrestricted Visualization

It's nice that visualization has developed over the years to the point that there are dedicated classes for it, but I also like learning informally.Tags: learning, rules | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Gerrymandering detection with simulations

Harry Stevens, for The Washington Post, how simulations can be used to detect severely gerrymandered congressional districts. In the interactive, you play the role of concerned citizen with the tas… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Where memes from the past decade came from

Know Your Meme analyzed a decade of meme data to see where the memes have come from, breaking it down by year. It’s all Twitter and TikTok these days, but it used to be YouTube and 4chan. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Play With Your Data

Time for less work and more play.Tags: fun, play | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Where We Find Meaning in the Everyday

Meaningfulness scores from the American Time Use Survey provide a hint of what we value.Tags: meaning, time use, well-being | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Splitting the US population evenly, with arbitrary shapes

By Engaging Data, this interactive map shows various splits of the United States with the condition that each division has the same population: This visualization lets you divide the US into 1,2,3,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

China’s possible blockade around Taiwan

It appears China wants to impose a blockade around Taiwan with ships, submarines, and airplanes. The New York Times mapped the possibility and how it could disrupt life in and around the island. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Losses and comebacks of Serena Williams

We tend to celebrate the wins in sports and often forget about or don’t see the climb that athletes take to get to the top. Artur Galocha and Adrian Blanco, for The Washington Post, look back… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Big diagram of metabolic pathways

The contents of this diagram is not in my scope, but it is a very big, detailed diagram of metabolic pathways. Many steps, many arrows. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Where restaurant chains dominate

Researchers Xiaofan Liang and Clio Andris estimated the percentage of restaurants that are chains and independent to identify “McCities”: These high chainness McCities are prevalent in … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Introduction to Probability for Data Science, a free book

Introduction to Probability for Data Science is a free-to-download book by Purdue statistics professor Stanley H. Chan: We need a book that balances the theory and practice. We need a book that pro… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, August 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Breaking down the higher price on a restaurant receipt

If you’ve eaten at a restaurant lately, you might have noticed a substantially higher bill than you’re used to. You’d be right to assume that it’s because of things like inf… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization for One

Communicate to fewer people to reach more.Tags: audience, generic, specificity | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Worst drought in Europe, in 500 years

Dominic Royé mapped river discharge in Europe over the past few months: A single map for the worst #drought in 500 years in Europe. The river discharge anomaly based on reanalysis data from June to… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

How much gas European sites have stored for the winter

Reuters goes with the radar chart to show gas supplies, as European countries prepare for the winter and possibly no gas from Russia. The circular shape shows the annual cycle, the gray shows the p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago