Seeing How Much We Ate Over the Years

How long will chicken reign supreme? Who wins between lemon and lime? Is nonfat ice cream really ice cream? Does grapefruit ever make a comeback? Find out in these charts. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Money-in-politics nonprofits merge their datasets

Center for Responsive Politics and National Institute on Money in Politics are merging their datasets to make it more accessible: The nation’s two leading money-in-politics data organizations… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Rockhounding in California

Any outdoor activity sounds amazing at this point. Andrea Roberson and Casey Miller for Los Angeles Times put together this charming to rockhounding in California. Each rock type has the tools need… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Writing about probability in a way that people will understand

We see probabilities mentioned in the news, in weather forecasts, during sporting events, political arguments, business reports, elections, medical advice, and scientific findings. But probability … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Visualization Books for a Beginner – The Process 142

My two cents on a discussion about what visualization books beginners should and should not read. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Myth of the Asian American model minority, explained with charts

Asian Americans are often viewed as a “model minority”, but when you look, just a little bit closer, the tag doesn’t fit. Connie Hanzhang Jin for NPR breaks it down in a set of si… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Where chess pieces are most often captured

Reddit user desfirsit made heatmaps to show where on the chess board pieces are usually captured. The top two rows are for black pieces, and the bottom row is for white pieces. I’m no chess p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Seeing how devices talk to each other

Your computer connects to your router, which connects to your modem. Your printer connects to your computer. The devices all send data and talk to each other. Nicole He and Eran Hilleli imagined th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Colors of Bob Ross explored

Connor Rothschild charted all the colors Bob Ross used in The Joy of Painting: Most commonly, paintings have 12 colors. Of the 403 pieces in The Joy of Painting, 100 used 12 colors. The peak is con… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Recreation of the neighborhood in the Tulsa race massacre

In 1921, hundreds were killed. The New York Times recreated the neighborhood, adding weight to what happened and showing the loss a hundred years ago: For decades, what happened in Greenwood was wi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Where wind and solar needs to grow by 2050

Based on estimates from Princeton University’s Net-Zero America Project, Veronica Penney for The New York Times mapped where wind and solar energy need to expand to to reach the United States’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Official LEGO world map set

We’ve seen maps made out of LEGO bricks before, but LEGO is about to release an official world map set. And cartographers everywhere rejoiced. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, May 2021 Roundup

Here’s the good stuff for May. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

A short film on giving up privacy, for better or worse

We know what you did during lockdown is a short fiction film by Financial Times that demonstrates the challenges of using data for good at the sacrifice of privacy and the complexity of individual … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Jobs that Marry Together

Find out which jobs most often pair together among married couples. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Map shows you where a raindrop ends up

River Runner is a fun interactive map by Sam Learner. Click anywhere in the contiguous United States to drop some rain and, based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the map shows you where th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated

Overall, Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are down in the United States, but much of that is from vaccinations. When you look at only those who are not vaccinated, the rates are still high in ma… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Four types of people who prevent full vaccination

The United States vaccination rate was rolling for a while there, but it has slowed down. Sema Sgaier for NYT Opinion talks about why that is, breaking it down to four general types of people who a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

How perception can save lives

Visualization and perception researcher Lace Padilla was on the kid-centric show Mission Unstoppale to talk about visualizing uncertainty: I approve of this message. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Looking at What’s Not There – The Process 140

Data is always incomplete. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Most common professional marriages

Susie Neilson for the San Francisco Chronicle compared the marriage of professions in San Francisco against the national average. As you might expect, there were a lot of programmers: Perhaps unsur… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Watercolor Maptiles by Stamen are now part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection

In 2012, Stamen Design released watercolor map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data. It was amazing to see, especially for a time when most online maps looked about the same. Now these watercolor map … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Coping with the big numbers

Connie Jin, who works for NPR and updates a Covid-19 dashboard, talks about in comic-form feeling numb to the large numbers and hot to deal. It comes back to the individual. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Change in Age Generations

Since no one has figured out how to defeat time, age generations come and go. This chart shows the generational breakdowns since 1920. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Transform an image into a pixel-ly visual

Here’s a fun interactive by Duc-Quang Nguyen. Upload an image and get back a transformed visual that uses dots, lines, or ascii. Use the menu options to easily change resolution, colors, and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Historical shifts in where people live

The places in the United States with the highest populations weren’t always like that. There were shifts over decades. With the recent Census release for state populations, Harry Stevens and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Climate normals mapped over time

Every decade the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases climate normals to provide a baseline to compare current weather against. NOAA just released the estimates for 1991 to 2020… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Making a Quick, Custom Prevalence Map – The Process 139

This week I’m describing my process behind a quick map. You can download the code at the end of this issue. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Map of people moving during pandemic

It was only a matter of time before someone showed dots moving across a map to show migration during the pandemic. Again, using USPS change of address data, Yan Wu and Luis Melgar for the Wall Stre… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series

The Information Graphic Visionaries book series just launched on Kickstarter. Emma Willard, Florence Nightingale, and Étienne-Jules Marey are the subjects of three books, each including high-resolu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

‘Less than 10 percent’ outdoors

The CDC said that “less than 10 percent” of coronavirus cases were from outdoor transmissions. David Leonhardt for The New York Times argues why in all likelihood that number is way too… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Where People are Married and Not

About 48% of the U.S. population aged 15 and older is married. I was curious if there were regional variations, so I mapped it. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Rankings for YouTube video greetings

If you’ve watched even just a few videos on YouTube, you probably noticed that many videos, especially those in the vlogging genre, start the same way: “Hey guys.” YouTube Culture… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Visualization accessibility

Øystein Moseng for Highcharts provides a brief guide on making your visualizations for accessible. Guideline #4 on not relying completely on color to show the data: Relying on color as the only mea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Varying demographics within the Asian American population

We often hear about the Asian American community as one big group of people, but go one level down and you see a lot of variance within the group. Nicole Chavez and Priya Krishnakumar, reporting fo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

All the art in the Oval Office

The President of the United States chooses the art for the Oval Office, and the choices show who the president admires or the image they want to project. Larry Buchanan and Matt Stevens for The New… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Visualization, Manually – The Process 138

Put in the time to get to know your data and design around that for best results. Usually this part of the process isn’t automated. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Bird song sonographs show distinct drawing patterns

These sonographs of bird song, in contrast to the sounds from traditional instruments, show complex patterns on a base frequency. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

See if you live in a political bubble

Gus Wezerek, Ryan D. Enos, and Jacob Brown for NYT Opinion use neighborhood-level data to show how those around you voted in the 2020 election. They ask: do you live in a political bubble? Enter an… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Observable Plot, a JavaScript library for more straightforward visualization of tabular data

If you’re into the notebook workflow, Observable Plot is a JavaScript library built for you: We created Plot to better support exploratory data analysis in reactive, JavaScript notebooks like… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Divorce Rates and Income

Divorce rates are tied to job security, age, and occupation, so it should make sense that we see a pattern when we plot divorce rates against income. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Stephen Curry’s record-setting month for shooting threes

Steph Curry has been on a tear as of late. In April he made more threes than any NBA player ever has in a month. Ben Golliver and Artur Galocha for The Washington Post provide perspective on just h… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Climate change and uncertainty

In his new data-driven documentary, Neil Halloran digs into the uncertainty attached to estimates for climate change. Halloran’s argument is that we have to understand the limitations of fore… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, April 2021 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Maps of land required to get to net-zero emissions

Princeton University’s Net-Zero America project analyzes and models the infrastructure required to get to net-zero carbon emissions nationally. Dave Merrill for Bloomberg highlighted the grou… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Melting glaciers

Niko Kommenda for The Guardian used small multiples to show 90 of the largest glaciers in the world and how they have melted over many decades. The animation transitions between two time periods fo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Population Growth and Seats Gained

The Census Bureau released state population counts for 2020. Here’s how each state gained and lost population and seats. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Surprise, Less Happiness During Pandemic

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked people about their happiness. It never changed much — until 2020 happened. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago