For The Pudding, Lars Verspohl provides an introduction to statistical models disguised as a lesson on finding good wine. Start with a definition of wine, which becomes a way to describe it with th… | Continue reading
Reviewing Deborah Stone’s Counting and Tim Harford’s The Data Detective, Hannah Fry discusses the usefulness of data and its limitations for The New Yorker: Numbers are a poor substitut… | Continue reading
For ProPublica, Ken Schwencke reports on a poor data system that relies on local law enforcement to voluntarily enter data: Local law enforcement agencies reported a total of 6,121 hate crimes in 2… | Continue reading
I was curious who played for a single team over their entire career, who skipped around, and how the patterns changed over the decades. | Continue reading
But probably not. | Continue reading
In what seems to have become a trend of making more and more detailed election maps, NYT’s The Upshot mapped results down to the addresses of 180 million voters: The maps above — and througho… | Continue reading
Russell Jeung, chair of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University, on NPR about the recent rise: What we’ve discovered isn’t that we’ve just had a sp… | Continue reading
For Kontinentalist, Isabella Chua took a dive into the evolution of Chinese names: Put simply, names encode the wishes parents have for their children. So, what were these wishes? For answers, I tu… | Continue reading
For Quartz, Amanda Shendruk and Marc Bain analyzed skin tones that appeared in beauty and fashion ads on Instagram. The graphics use Blackout Tuesday on June 2, 2020, when many brands vowed to impr… | Continue reading
As a lead-in and backdrop to a timeline of the past year by The Washington Post, an animated dot density map represents Covid-19 deaths. “Every point of light is a life lost to coronavirus.&#… | Continue reading
As part of their Citizen Browser project to inspect Facebook, The Markup shows a side-by-side comparison between Facebook feeds for different groups, based on the feeds of 1,000 paid participants. … | Continue reading
Alicia Parlapiano and Josh Katz, reporting for NYT’s The Upshot, plotted the average aid for different groups, outlined by the March 2021 stimulus bill. The estimates come from a new analysis… | Continue reading
Seeing CO2, by design studio Extraordinary Facility, is a playable data visualization that imagines if carbon dioxide were visible. You drive a car around collecting bits of information about carbo… | Continue reading
Bad charts get made. It’s inevitable. Sometimes I wonder how it happens though. | Continue reading
BirdCast, from Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, shows current forecasts for where birds are headed over the United States: Bird migration forecasts show predicted noctu… | Continue reading
Chris Ume, with the help of Tom Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher, created highly believable deepfakes of Tom Cruise and posted the videos to TikTok. Ume showed the breakdown of the arduous process … | Continue reading
We already looked at minimum wage over time, but when it comes to geography and income, you also have to consider the cost of living for a fair comparison. | Continue reading
Speaking of A.I. and fiction, Adam Epstein for Quartz reported on how Wattpad, the platform for people to share stories, uses machine learning to find potential movies: Wattpad uses a machine-learn… | Continue reading
Pamela Miskhin, in collaboration with The Pudding, wrote a love story. It’s not just any love story though. The text is based on Mishkin’s own experiences and input from GPT-3, the lang… | Continue reading
The Royal Statistical Society published ten lessons governments should takeaway from this year, which should naturally apply to standard data practice: Invest in public health data – which sh… | Continue reading
There was a lot of uncertainty in the beginning of the pandemic, so the forecasts varied across sources. There were also many forecasts. Youyang Gu provided on of those forecasts, and it predicted … | Continue reading
For Reuters, Julia Janicki and Simon Scarr, with illustrations by Catherine Tai, show why bats make ideal hosts for viruses. They went with the old nature journal aesthetic, which I appreciate. One… | Continue reading
Every month I collect new visualization tools and learning resources to help you make better charts. Here’s the good stuff for February 2021. | Continue reading
RAWGraphs, a tool conceived by DensityDesign in 2013, got a 2.0 update in a collaborative effort between DensityDesign, Calibro and Inmagik: RAW Graphs is an open source data visualization framewor… | Continue reading
This is quite a dive by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and Jeremy White for The New York Times. They look at the potential danger of melting ice from Greenland flowing into the Gulf Stream. An animated ma… | Continue reading
As schools begin to reopen, The New York Times illustrates why classrooms should open a window for ventilation. Lower viral concentrations swirling around means reduced exposure. The 3-D model to s… | Continue reading
Minimum wage has increased over the years, but by how much depends on where you live. | Continue reading
Oftentimes we see “algorithms” referenced in various contexts, but the definition of an algorithm is often unclear. For MIT Technology Review, Kristian Lum describes what an “algo… | Continue reading
For Reuters, Sarah Slobin and Feilding Cage imagine life back at the office with an interactive game. Navigate through different office scenarios while maintaining social distance: To understand wh… | Continue reading
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that said life expectancy decreased by a full year in 2020. While the calculation is correct, the interpretation and message from th… | Continue reading
Everyone’s a beginner at some point. | Continue reading
While we’re on the topic of scale, The New York Times plotted weekly deaths below and above normal since 2015. Check out that Covid-19 pandemic mountain. NYT has been updating this chart, but… | Continue reading
The United States passed the half million mark for confirmed Covid-19 deaths. It’s difficult to imagine 500,000 of anything, let alone deaths in a year, so Reuters used a modified beeswarm ch… | Continue reading
I compared spending in 1996 against the most recent spending estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | Continue reading
I’m happy to announce a new course on mapping geographic data in R, using the ggplot2 package. The course is by data journalist and visualization consultant Maarten Lambrechts, and it’s… | Continue reading
A common depiction of an iceberg is one that has a short head peeking out of the water and a deep spike underneath. However, as Megan Thompson-Munson pointed out, that’s not how icebergs actu… | Continue reading
For several years, Xavi Bou has been using long-exposure photography to capture stills of bird flight patterns. The project, Ornitographies, produced gloriously abstract images. There’s also … | Continue reading
As vaccinations roll out, we work towards herd immunity, there are various challenges to consider along the way. Thomas Wilburn and Richard Harris, reporting for NPR, used simulations to imagine th… | Continue reading
The two approaches answer two different questions. | Continue reading
When we visualize data to communicate to others, we must consider what others see through their eyes. Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin is a free app for the Mac that lets you see how those with vario… | Continue reading
Based on data from the Global Forecast System, The New York Times mapped the lowest temperatures across the country between February 14 and 16. The blue-orange color scale diverges at freezing, whi… | Continue reading
Thomas Lin Pedersen announced the ragg package, which makes font usage in R more straightforward: I’m extremely pleased to present the culmination of several years of work spanning the system… | Continue reading
Lauren Leatherby and Amy Schoenfeld Walker reporting for The New York Times: “Every state is improving,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “We … | Continue reading
PowerOutage.US keeps a running tally of outages across the United States, and it’s looking bad for Texas. Millions of people in the state are without power, with temperatures in the teens. Sc… | Continue reading
This is fun. Lisa Charlotte Rost made a data visualization crossword puzzle. Print the PDF and win all eternal glory of your household. | Continue reading
Visualization rules and best practices are generalized solutions to generalized problems. Better visualization requires a more specific view. | Continue reading
You probably knew that coronavirus deaths have been in the several thousands per day for a few months now. But Lazaro Gamio, for The New York Times, framed the cumulative rates in an even more stri… | Continue reading
Vaccines provide light at the end of the tunnel, but when we finally get to the end depends on the speed at which we vaccinate. The Washington Post considers Joe Biden’s pledge for 100 millio… | Continue reading