Wildfires caused by fireworks

It’s Independence Day here in the United States, which means there will be fireworks in a lot of places. This chart from John Keefe for CNN shows why plans have changed in many areas. That… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Analysis of compound curse words used on Reddit

As you know, Reddit is typically a sophisticated place of kind and pleasant conversation. So Colin Morris analyzed the usage of compound pejoratives in Reddit comments: The full “matrix”… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, June 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Population change in the UK

The Office for National Statistics for the UK published an interactive to show how population has changed: The population of England and Wales has increased by more than 3.5 million in the 10 years… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

15 years

This past weekend marked 15 years since I first posted on FlowingData. What started as a placeholder for class projects, became a hobby, which eventually turned into a career choice. With each year… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Visualising Knowledge

Visualising Knowledge is an open book from PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, based on 25 years of making charts: PBL data visualisation is about visualising research results, using g… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Introduction to statistical learning

An Introduction to Statistical Learning, by Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Rob Tibshirani: As the scale and scope of data collection continue to increase across virtually all fiel… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Personal life dashboard

Felix Krause tracks many metrics of his life, both manually and passively, and put the data in one database. He put up a subset of the data on an updating site that shows where he is, what he’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Active shooter endings

For The New York Times, Larry Buchanan and Lauren Leatherby used Sankey diagrams to show the endings from active shootings in the United States: Most attacks captured in the data were already over … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Increased distance to the nearest clinic

With Roe vs. Wade in place, there were areas in the United States where a woman had to travel farther than others to get to the nearest clinic. With Roe vs. Wade overturned, the geography will chan… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visually Inefficient

Trading optimized visual efficiency in charts for joy and interest.Tags: efficiency | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Diagram of watercolors from the 17th century

In 1692, artist A. Boogert published a guide to watercolors, showing the thousands of possibilities of mixing 31 shades. Nicholas Rougeux, as per his specialty, modernized the work into an interact… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping the boundaries of history

While geographic boundaries can often seem like a semi-static thing, they’ve changed a lot when you look at them on the scale of centuries. Point in History, by Hans Hack, presents a map of w… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Pie charts of dogs

John Rich made pie charts of dog body proportions. This is very important.…Tags: dogs, humor | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ How to Make an Animated Donut Chart in R

There are "better" ways to show proportions over time, but sometimes you just want an animated donut.Tags: animation, R | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Shifting flight paths for wealthy Russians

For The New York Times, Pablo Robles, Anton Troianovski, and Agnes Chang mapped the change in destinations for Russian private jets, before and after sanctions. Before, it was more about Paris, Mil… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Possible lead exposure around small airports

Thousands of smaller airplanes are still allowed to use leaded fuel, which can lead to unwanted emissions around airports. For Quartz, David Yanofsky and Michael J. Coren mapped flight activity for… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Gridlines

They serve as a point of reference in some charts and guide the eyes in others, coming in different styles and layouts.Tags: grid | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Communicating risk in the context of daily living

Wayne Oldford, a statistics professor at the University of Waterloo, explains risk in the context of daily life at the individual level, because “one in a million” is not especially int… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Hands-On Data Visualization, an open-access book on interactive visualization for beginners

Hands-On Data Visualization, by Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, is an open-access book geared for beginners. The book starts with spreadsheets, and then walks you through some of the more high-le… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Unreliable FBI crime data

The Marshall Project and Axios report that the FBI changed their reporting system last year, and 40 percent of law enforcement agencies didn’t submit any data: In 2021, the FBI retired its ne… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Different languages, but similar information rates

Christophe Coupé and company analyzed speech rate (on the left) across different languages, and then compared it to information rate (on the right) in bits per second. While speech rate and informa… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Map of closest airports everywhere

This fun interactive map by William B. Davis shows you the ten closest airports, given a location in the world. The current location serves as the “hub”, and the ten “spokes”… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Browser share over time

James Eagle used an animated donut chart to show browser share from 1996 to present. I have fond memories of firing up Netscape to punch in a web address I saw in a magazine. It felt like I was ope… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Using Absolute vs. Relative Scales

The key is assigning an appropriate amount of weight, statistically and visually, for comparisons that make sense.Tags: absolute, relative, scale | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

History of heat records in major U.S. cities

Matt Daniels and Russell Goldenberg for The Pudding are tracking heat records in 400 cities in the United States. Choose a city, see if yesterday was a record, and find out how it measures up again… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Garbage in space

There are thousands of satellites that orbit Earth, with about half of them launched in the past three years. Financial Times shows why that’s a problem in a scrolling piece through space deb… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Maps of noise

Karim Douïeb, in collaboration with Possible, mapped noise in Paris, New York, and London. The color on each map represents noise level, and if you have your sound on, you can mouse over areas to h… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Commonness of Divorce in America

I wondered how common it is for someone to get a divorce. While I’ve touched on the topic before, I’ve never calculated it directly, so I gave it a go.Tags: divorce, marriage | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Time splits from a visualization freelancer

Eli Holder shows how he split his freelance time across various projects and categories. With visualization work, a lot of your time is spent doing non-visualization things: As expected, at 16 perc… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Cancer and statistics

Hannah Fry works with statistics and risk, but her perspective changed when she was diagnosed with cancer. Fry documented the experience and it’s available on BBC: Hannah Fry, a professor of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Calculating the new cost of your summer road trip

With gas prices a lot higher than usual, Júlia Ledur, Leslie Shapiro, and N. Kirkpatrick, for The Washington Post, provide a calculator to see how much more your road trip will cost in the United S… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Three Questions to Visualize Data Effectively

Answer the questions. Produce more focused and useful charts.Tags: questions | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Examination of songs after virality on TikTok

Vox, in collaboration with The Pudding, looked at what happens when a song goes viral on TikTok. It heads down the TikTok-to-Spotify pipeline, which signals money to be made and draws labels to tak… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Catching students cheating with R

Matthew Crump, a psychology professor who discovered high volume cheating in his class via WeChat, outlines the saga in five parts. Bonus points for use of R to analyze the evidence: I do a lot of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Cost of breastfeeding, seen in self-tracked data

There are baby formula shortages in the United States. A criticism from some who don’t know what they’re talking about are for parents to “just” breastfeed. Alyssa Rosenberg… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Interest levels for political issues mapped

To estimate public interest in the many political issues across the United States, Axios used Google Trends data to map issues by congressional district. Switch between the many topics, and you see… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Election modeling explained

In election reporting, there’s a gap between real-time results and final results, so news orgs use statistical models to show where results appear to be headed. For The Washington Post, Adria… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Charting software that pre-dating Excel

RJ Andrews digs up the PC archives of charting software. Scrolling through the thread, you can see the roots of Excel in the software that pre-dates the 1987 Windows release, along with what was co… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, May 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Deaths by Firearm, Compared Against Injury-Related Deaths

Among 1- to 19-year-olds, regulations decreased motor vehicle deaths, but deaths by firearms increased and became the leading mechanism in 2018. Tags: firearms, mortality | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

U.S. still the outlier for gun homicide rate

This chart from The New York Times, based on estimates from Our World In Data and World Bank, shows GDP per capita against gun homicide rates. The United States stands alone. Why. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Children exposed to school shootings

The Washington Post maintains a database of school shootings (which is sad in itself that such a thing has to exist) to keep record of tragedy that the U.S. government does not track. They calculat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Final texts

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer, for NYT Opinion, approached the one-million mark for Covid deaths with text messages. The piece starts on February 29, 2020, when the first person died because of Covid. The … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Shrinking war mapped

The war in Ukraine continues, but the scale and objects appear to have changed over time. Josh Holder, Marco Hernandez, and Jon Huang for The New York Times mapped the shrinking scope as Russia los… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Generative sea creatures

Cindermedusae by Marcin Ignac is “a generative encyclopedia of imaginary sea creatures.” I’m…Tags: animals, generative art, Marcin Ignac | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Lives cut short by Covid

Alyssa Fowers and Leslie Shapiro, for The Washington Post, used the stories of 114 individuals to show weekly Covid deaths. Each story is “cut short”, making the length of each fragment… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ This Time With Purpose

Without purpose, there isn't a whole lot to grasp on.Tags: purpose | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago