Weather Strip, an app that shows the forecast as a time series

Weather Strip is a new weather app by visualization researcher Robin Stewart. It shows the week’s forecast as a time series chart, aiming to show you details at a glance. The temperature show… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Learning New Visualization Things Practically – The Process 149

Learn about new visualization things, but also get actual work done. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Olympic event visual explainers

With the Olympics starting on Friday, The New York Times started their coverage of events and athletes to watch. Their visual explainers are always very good in that the topic is entertaining and t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Case rates adjusted for the unvaccinated

Covid-19 cases in the United States were down, but they’re moving up again, mostly among the unvaccinated. Dan Keating and Leslie Shapiro for The Washington Post break down the comparisons by… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Introduction to Deep Learning

Sebastian Raschka made 170 videos on deep learning, and you can watch all of the lessons now: I just sat down this morning and organized all deep learning related videos I recorded in 2021. I am su… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Falling spin rates in baseball after rule enforcement

NYT’s The Upshot analyzed spin rate on pitches before and after enforcing a ban on sticky substances that provide more grip on the ball. The rule has been in place for decades but wasn’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Rise of K-pop

K-pop seems to be inescapable these days, which really confuses me. Marian Liu, Youjin Shin, and Shelly Tan for The Washington Post explored the rise in popularity and what makes the songs and arti… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

How long it takes a ball to drop on various Solar System bodies

James O’Donoghue made this straightforward animation that shows how long it takes for a ball to drop one kilometer on different planets: It might be surprising to see large planets have a pul… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Analyzing Data, General to More Specific – The Process 148

Use basic statistical methods to move you towards fancier things. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Slowing and then renewed interest in getting vaccinated

When countries gained access to vaccines, there was an initial burst of vaccinations, but the rate leveled off in most places. Then a variant arrives, and an incentive or another push for vaccinati… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Noah Kalina’s averaged face over 7,777 days

Noah Kalina has been taking a picture of himself every day since January 11, 2000. He posted time-lapse videos in 2007, 2012, and 2020. Last year was the 20th of the project. Usually Kalina’s… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Map of drying reservoirs in the west

To show water levels in California’s drying reservoirs, The Washington Post used upside down triangles to represent each reservoir. I like the idea to use an encoding that kind of looks like … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

UEFA Euro 2020 matches visualized with triangle sets

Krisztina Szűcs used sets of animated triangles to show how each match played out. The triangles in the middle move up as each team scores, and the triangles on the side represent penalty kicks. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Value of R, the Statistics-specific language

Paul Ford has been learning R to better understand the field of Statistics. The takeaway: Deep in its heart, R is a language for making charts, and it’s genuinely fun to go into its world: statisti… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Retired Minard – The Process 147

Maybe it’s better to focus on the present to do the best with what we have, which moves us towards the future. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

How sports owners pay less taxes than athletes

ProPublica continues their analysis of an anonymous dump of tax records, this time with a focus on billionaire sports owners: The law favors people who are rich because they own things over people … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

How big tech grew by acquiring small tech

Big tech — Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook — got big and then got bigger with acquisitions of smaller companies. The Washington Post took a comprehensive look at all of the acquisit… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Tree canopy and income

Ian Leahy and Yaryna Serkez for NYT Opinion look at income and tree canopy in major cities. Higher median income neighborhoods correlate with cleaner and cooler air. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Find a color palette based on words

PhotoChrome is a straightforward tool that lets you use search terms to find a color palette. Just enter a query, and it spits out a color scheme of hex values based on matching images. It’s … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Sheep herding movements from above

Aerial photographer Lior Patel followed a herd of sheep in Yokneam. The results are much more interesting than they sound. [via Colossal] See also the work of Tim Whittaker who produced a video of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Analytical Stand-in – The Process 146

There’s visualization for analysis. There’s visualization for presentation. There’s overlap between the groups, but the differences require a varied approach. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Joy Generator

NPR put together a set of stories, videos, and interactives about bringing more joy into your life, which of course is always welcome. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Still Flowing at 14

FlowingData turned 14 years old last week. Is that old? It feels old. The site started as a sandbox to put class projects. Flat HTML files. JPEG files. Google Maps placemarkers. Flash. Vanilla Java… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Introduction to Modern Statistics

Introduction to Modern Statistics by Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel and Johanna Hardin is a free-to-download book: Introduction to Modern Statistics is a re-imagining of a previous title, Introduction to St… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Historical context for the heat in the Pacific Northwest

It’s been hot in the Pacific Northwest the past few days. NYT’s The Upshot plotted the temperatures against previous max temperatures since 1979. Hot. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Average color of geographic areas

Based on satellite imagery, Erin Davis found the average color of places around the world. The above is by county in the United States, but Davis also made maps by country, which are a mix of green… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Mail slowdown

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy proposed new standards for first-class mail, which would slow down how long it takes for you to receive a letter. The Washington Post made an interactive (paywall) to… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

All the matches from Euro 2020 in one chart

To see all the matches from the group stage of Euro 2020 in one chart, Krist Wongsuphasawat used a streamgraph showing aggregate scorelines from kickoff to finish. All matches start at 0-0, and the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources, June 2021 Roundup

Here’s the good stuff for June 2021. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

How the ultrarich use a Roth IRA to get more rich

ProPublica continues their analysis of an anonymous IRS tax records dump. In their most recent, they look at how Peter Thiel uses a Roth IRA to avoid taxes on billions. In the second half of the pi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Scoring hospitals by billing quality

Using data collected by Johns Hopkins University, Michelle McGhee and Will Chase for Axios provide a visual reference for the billing practices of for-profit hospitals: Rising deductibles and out-o… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Delaying motherhood

The New York Times mapped birth rates, which are down almost everywhere, especially among women in their 20s: The result has been the slowest growth of the American population since the 1930s, and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Passing restrictive voting bills

Bloomberg used a Sankey diagram to show the path of over a thousand voting bills, classifying them as restrictive, mixed effect, or expansive: Across the country, Republican state lawmakers propose… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

India vaccine procurement compared to other countries

Prasanta Kumar Dutta and Manas Mishra reporting for Reuters on the slow rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in India: Compared to many Western countries, India was late in procuring vaccines. Modi’s g… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Welcome to heat dome

It’s hot here in the western United States, and it’s only mid-June. From The Washington Post, we’re stuck in a heat dome: Hot air masses expand vertically into the atmosphere, cre… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Measuring centuries-old droughts through tree rings

To measure drought in the present day, we use data from sensors that constantly record environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, precipitation, and snow water content. But to measure drought… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Graphs before anyone knew what they were

Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer have a new book out: A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication. They rewind back 400 years and discuss the beginnings of visualization, when nobod… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Breaking Down a Chart Design – The Process 144

This week I broke down one of my projects and explained as many of the design choices as I could. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Spatula, a Python library for maintainable web scraping

This looks promising: While it is often easy, and tempting, to write a scraper as a dirty one-off script, spatula makes an attempt to provide an easy framework that most scrapers fit within without… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ How to Make Alluvial Diagrams

Here’s how to do it in R from start to finish, plus editing in illustration software. Make design choices and trade-offs for more readable charts. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Collapse of Mexico City Metro explained

The New York Times investigated the collapse of the Metro, which killed 26 people. They explain their findings with a 3-D model of the train and the tracks: The Times took thousands of photographs … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

xkcd: Base Rate

xkcd points out the importance of considering the baseline when making comparisons: | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Scale of a mouse plague

There’s a mouse plague in Australia right now. The words alone don’t express the scale and seriousness of this problem, but this Washington Post piece sure does. The combination of vide… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Drought in the Western United States

In what’s become a recurring theme almost every year, the western United States is experiencing drought, much of it exceptional or extreme. Nadja Popovich for The New York Times has the small… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Tapestry for reflective data visualization

As a way to reflect on 2020, Catherine Madden wove tapestry to visualize six time series. So nice. [via Visualising Data] | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Slow – The Process 143

If you’ve got it, take the time to understand and explore your data in the places others rushed through. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

All the passes in soccer visualized at once

This is a fun soccer graphic by Karim Douïeb. It shows 882,536 passes from 890 matches across various leagues and seasons. It looks cool as a static point cloud, but be sure to check out the animat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Billionaire tax rates

ProPublica anonymously obtained billionaires’ tax returns. Combining the data with Forbes’ billionaire wealth estimates, ProPublica calculated a “true tax rate” for America&… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago