Death rates by vaccination booster status

Our World in Data continues their important work on providing and showing up-to-date Covid data. Most recently, they updated death rates in Switzerland by vaccination plus booster status. The rates… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Analytics for U.S. government websites

With the announcement of free Covid-19 tests through the United States Postal Service, it’s interesting to watch to the analytics for U.S. government websites. USPS has more visitors right no… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Global ripple effect from underwater volcano

An underwater volcano erupted about 40 miles off the coast of the main island of Tonga. Using infrared data from the GOES satellite operated by NOAA, Mathew Barlow animated the ripple from the the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A visual and audio tour of sound at Nap Nap Swamp

When I think swamp noise, I imagine a blob of sound that’s some mix of water and wildlife, but that’s because I don’t know anything. Mitchell Whitelaw, in collaboration with ecolo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Congressmen who enslaved people

Using old Census records and documents, Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez for The Washington Post tallied the congressmen who enslaved people over time. There were more than 1,700… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Debating About Visualization – The Process 172

The discussions this week felt familiar. Probably because we’ve seen this many times, since the beginning of charts themselves. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

New shopping search patterns from the pandemic

Schema Design, Google Trends, and Axios collaborated on The New Normal, looking at how searches for certain products has changed since the pandemic started. Keywords were taken from Google’s … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

All-time temperature records broken in 2021

Using data from NOAA, Krishna Karra and Tim Wallace for The New York Times mapped all-time temperature records set in 2021. Red indicates an all-time high, and blue indicates an all-time low. Circl… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Settling all the internet debates in one go with a bunch of polling

The internet was once this fun place where people had goofy debates about how to pronounce “gif” (with a hard g), the color of a dress (blue and black), and whether or not a hot dog is … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Play miniature golf, learn about congressional redistricting

Congressional redistricting and gerrymandering are important topics, because they can directly change election results. However, gerrymandering is called gerrymandering, so it’s too easy to g… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Scale of the bigger, more detailed universe

We’ve learned more about the universe since Charles and Ray Eames produced Powers of Ten in 1977, so the BBC made an homage to the film, updating with what we know now. Spoiler alert: the uni… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Powers of Ten

The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames from 1977 shows the size of the universe by starting at human scale and then zooming out further and further. Then it comes back down to Earth and zooms i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A Quick and Easy Way to Make Spiral Charts in R

Now that we’ve discovered another way to annoy chart snobs, here’s how you can make your own spirals. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Spiral graph to show Covid-19 cases

This spiralized chart by Gus Wezerek and Sara Chodosh for NYT Opinion has sparked discussions on what it means to communicate data. A lot of people don’t like it. I’m gathering my thoug… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Four decades of oceanic wave moments, as a surfing game

Surf is a data-based game by Andy Bergmann that lets you move across a thirty-seven-year time series from NOAA. The data forms the waves, and you’re a dog on a surf board jumping over sharks.… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Finding New Visualization Tools for a New Point of View – The Process 171

It’s time to bask in the joys of knowing nothing again. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Scale of black holes

I’m not sure there’s any way to really understand the scale of the largest black holes in the universe, but Kurzgesagt gives it a good try. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Drop rain anywhere in the world and see where it ends up

One of my favorites of the year, Sam Learner’s River Runner shows you a terrain map that lets you place a drop of rain anywhere in the contiguous United States. You’re then taken on a r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Analysis of Facebook groups before January 6

The Washington Post and ProPublica analyzed Facebook group posts that disputed election results: To determine the extent of posts attacking Biden’s victory, The Post and ProPublica obtained a uniqu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

What the omicron numbers tell us and do not tell us

May Louise Kelly for NPR spoke briefly with biostatistics professor Natalie Dean on the omicron surge and what we can take away from the data: Yeah, I mean, the public health impact is made up a lo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

False positives with prenatal tests for rare conditions

Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia for NYT’s The Upshot look at the uncertainty of prenatal tests for rare conditions. For some tests, the results are more often wrong than they are right, which c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2021

I looked back and picked my favorite projects for 2021. It was a long year. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources, December 2021 Roundup

In the last roundup of 2021, here’s the good stuff for December. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Church of the 95% Confidence Interval

This is Hallgrímskirkja, a church in Reykjavík, Iceland. It will now also be known as the Church of the 95% Confidence Interval. The Church of the 95% Confidence Interval #rstats pic.twitter.com/m0… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

David Rumsey Map Center, cataloging historical works

The David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford houses hundreds of thousands of maps dating back to the 1500s. Andres Picon for San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the collection: At the heart of that ende… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Anonymized data is rarely anonymous

Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, int… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Covid-19 mortality before and after vaccine eligibility

Denise Lu and Albert Sun for The New York Times show the shifts in Covid-19 deaths among different demographic groups: The change in death rates among groups is starker by race and ethnicity, and t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

xkcd: Unknowable truth

xkcd makes Statistics so fulfilling. George E. P. Box comes to mind. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

World Chess Championship in charts

Magnus Carlsen continued to assert his dominance at the World Chess Championship. FiveThirtyEight broke down Carlsen’s dominance in the final match with Ian Nepomniachtchi with a series of di… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Virtual proctoring simulation

Many colleges use virtual proctoring software in an effort to reduce cheating on tests that students take virtually at home. But the software relies on facial recognition and assumptions about the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Shifting currents and melting ice in the Antarctic

Based on data from autonomous sensors floating in the oceans, researchers are able to model the flows and characteristics of ocean currents in more detail than ever before. For The New York Times, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ How to Make Frequency Trails in Excel

Also known as ridgelines, use the method to create a compact visualization where you can easily identify major patterns and outliers. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A catalog of all the Covid visualizations

The COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection is a project to catalog Covid-related graphics across countries, sources, and styles. They call it COVIC for short, which seems like a stretch for an ac… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Launching a telescope to explore the Big Bang

NASA is launching the James Webb Space Telescope on December 22, 2021 with an objective to collect data on light from 13.8 billion light-years away. Using 3-D models from NASA, Rahul Mukherjee and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping the weather disasters of 2021

Zach Levitt and Bonnie Berkowitz for The Washington Post mapped and animated the natural and weather disasters from 2021. Differing from the 2019 version by Tim Meko, they framed it by month, which… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

What works in visualization, scientifically speaking

Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, and Jessica Hullman published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest an expansive review of what researchers know so fa… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Why we listen to the same Christmas songs

You know it’s the holiday season when Mariah Carey starts singing about wanting you for Christmas. The Washington Post goes into why we listen to the same songs every year: Holiday music burr… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Sorting Usefully – The Process 169

Hi, Welcome to issue #169 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members about how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I’m walking through the small steps I take … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

NASA solar probe touched the sun

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe in 2018 in an effort to explore closer to the sun. The probe recently flew through and out of the Sun’s upper atmosphere to successfully sample particles … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Vaccination rates compared against country wealth

Vaccine supply is only part of the equation. For The New York Times, Keith Collins and Josh Holder looked at distribution of available doses in countries, categorized by income group. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Flowchart for pandemic supply chain issues

Lazaro Gamio and Peter S. Goodman for The New York Times used a flowchart to explain how the world’s supply chains got to where they are now. The scroll takes you through the set of intertwin… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Climate change postcards from every country

The effects of climate change can be seen around the world, in the present. The New York Times uses a mix of maps, charts, videos, illustrations, and photographs to imagine postcards sent from ever… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Leland Wilkinson, creator of The Grammar of Graphics, passed away

Leland Wilkinson passed away on Friday, according to his daughter Amie. In visualization circles, he was best known for The Grammar of Graphics, which defined a system to describe and implement all… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Most used emoji for the year

I am told people use these things called emoji in their messages to communicate emotional cues in the text. There is a face for laughter. There is a smiling one. There is even one that is a pile of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Stephen Curry career threes compared to other players

Stephen Curry is about to break the record for number of three-pointers made in a career. By law, as dictated by sports visualization record keeping, a multiple line chart must be made to show the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Animated map of microplastics in the ocean

Using estimates based on satellite data, Joshua Stevens for NASA Earth Observatory mapped the concentration of microplastics in the ocean over time: Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Get Input – The Process 168

What happens when you spend too much time with a dataset. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

What People Spend Most of Their Money On, By Income Group, Relatively Speaking

More money on average means bigger houses, more expensive cars, and fancier restaurants. But what if you look at relative spending instead of total dollars? | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago