There’s something about hearing music live no matter how many times you’ve heard a song record in the studio. Maybe the acoustics are different. Maybe the musicians play a favorite song… | Continue reading
For NYT Opinion, Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson returned to the topic of location data logged by our mobile phones. This time though, they turned their attention to the United States Capitol… | Continue reading
Continuing her annual tradition, Janelle Shane trained various AI models to generate two-word-all-caps love messages for those chalky Valentine’s Day candy hearts. So deep. So profound. See a… | Continue reading
The Pandemic Graphics Archive is a work-in-progress collection of floor signs and posters from our current days of distance and mask-wearing. [via swissmiss] | Continue reading
People’s interpretation of a chart can change if you use differents words to describe it, even if the data stays the same. | Continue reading
Data Visualization in Society, an open access book, is a collection of works that looks closer at the role data visualization plays beyond the technical aspects of the discipline: The expansion of … | Continue reading
This is interesting: What does 425,000 Covid deaths sound like? I was inspired by this article by @LazaroGamio and @LaurenLeatherby for the NY Times, where they visualized how long to reach another… | Continue reading
NYT’s The Upshot published their precinct-level map of 2020 election results. Zoom in to your geographic area and bask in or scratch your head over the detailed variation. This seems be a rec… | Continue reading
With this straightforward unit chart, wcd.fyi shows which generation each Senate member belonged to, from 1947 through 2021. Each rectangle represents a senator, and each column represents a cohort… | Continue reading
I’m also looking forward to Jer Thorp’s Living in Data, which comes out later this year but is available for pre-order: In this provocative book, Thorp brings his work as a data artist … | Continue reading
While we’re on the topic of Statistics books for the general public, David Spieglhalter’s The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data is also on my reading list. In The Art of Statist… | Continue reading
Tim Harford has a new book coming out tomorrow called The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us… | Continue reading
For Reuters, Feilding Cage, Chris Canipe and Prasanta Dutta made an interactive that lets you adjust dose rate and state in a simulation to get an estimate for when we might reach herd immunity. As… | Continue reading
Vivian Wu made a snowflake generator. Adjust parameters such as growth, kaleidoscoping, and density, and you dear friend, can make yourself a unique snowflake of your very own. I think I’ll j… | Continue reading
Here’s the good stuff for January. | Continue reading
The United States passed 425,000 coronavirus deaths this week. For The New York Times, Lazaro Gamio and Lauren Leatherby used dot density over time to show how we got to this point. Each dark pixel… | Continue reading
Also known as trellis charts, lattice chart, or whatever you want to call them, the technique lets you compare several categories in one view. | Continue reading
Twitter released a small JavaScript library to make density plots — for when you have a lot of overlapping points and could use some granular binning. Feed a method an array of thousands of x… | Continue reading
With vaccines, we might be tempted to jump back into “normal” life before it’s really safe. The New York Times reports on why waiting until March instead of February might be the … | Continue reading
Maybe you remember the SimCity-like views through satellite imagery from a few of years ago. Robert Simmon from Planet Labs returns to the topic discussing practical use cases and advantages over a… | Continue reading
Thomas Mock explains how to extract and parse data tables in image files via ImageMagick and R: There are many times where someone shares data as an image, whether intentionally due to software con… | Continue reading
Jon Schwabish has a new book coming out: Better Data Visualizations. To kick things off, he’s running a video series on the many different chart types. There will be 50 videos released daily,… | Continue reading
I make most of my static charts in R, but I always bring them into Illustrator for polish, layout, and readability. Here’s my process. | Continue reading
The New York Times labeled all of the people sitting behind Joe Biden during the inauguration. It’s a straightforward but slick interactive that lets you pan and zoom the photograph. Click on… | Continue reading
Based on estimates from the MIT Trancik Lab, The New York Times plotted average carbon dioxide emissions against average cost per month for electric, hybrid, and gas vehicles. Each dot represents a… | Continue reading
For Bloomberg, Jeremy C.F. Lin and Rachael Dottle show what Joe Biden’s inauguration will look like, given all of the recent events and 2020. No public access and 25,000 National Guard person… | Continue reading
For NYT’s The Upshot, Kevin Quealy has been cataloging all of the insults Trump tweeted over the past five years. The project is complete: As a political figure, Donald J. Trump used Twitter … | Continue reading
As you probably know, there was a big Parler data scrape before the app and site went down. ProPublica spliced Parler video posts, sorting them by time and location. The result is basically a TikTo… | Continue reading
Tom Scott explains how Cloudflare uses a wall of lava lamps to generate random numbers. A video camera is pointed at the wall, and the movement in the lamps plus noise from the video provides rando… | Continue reading
The best way to make charts more interesting is to provide lots of details, which requires more work on your end but pays off in the end result. | Continue reading
In an effort to preserve part of her family’s culture, Jane Zhang designed recipe cards illustrating foods from her mother and grandmother. They provide ingredients and steps, but they also p… | Continue reading
Just before the social network Parler went down, a researcher who goes by the Twitter username @donk_enby scraped 56.7 terabytes of data from the site via a less-than-secure API. Motherboard report… | Continue reading
The New York Times outlined the minutes from the speech leading to the mob at the Capitol. By now you’ve probably seen the videos and pictures and have an idea of what happened. But the timel… | Continue reading
For The Atlantic, Dani Alexis Ryskamp compares the financials of The Simpsons against present day medians, arguing that the fictional family’s lifestyle is no longer attainable: The purchasin… | Continue reading
Last year, around the time when people were baking a lot of things, Sarah Robinson used machine learning to find a recipe for a “cakie”: Like many people, I’ve been entertaining myself … | Continue reading
Natalie Wolchover for Quanta Magazine asked several physicists what a particle is. She came away with several points of view. For example, the particle as a “irreducible representation of a g… | Continue reading
For NYT’s The Upshot, Nate Cohn explains how Warnock and Ossoff won Georgia. The accompanying map by Charlie Smart provides a clear picture of swooping arrows that show the shifts from the ge… | Continue reading
I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but this year seems different and requires some goals. | Continue reading
The Washington Post pieced together video footage from multiple sources for a timeline of the events. Terrible. | Continue reading
OpenAI trained a neural network that they call DALL·E with a dataset of text and image pairs. So now the neural network can take text input and output random combinations of descriptors and objects… | Continue reading
The brickr package in R by Ryan Timpe takes an image, converts it to a mosaic, and then provides a piece list and instructions for the build. While not officially affiliated with the LEGO group, Ti… | Continue reading
State population dictates the number of seats in the House of Representatives, so ideally, the decennial Census counts everyone and power is fairly distributed. On the surface, that seems straightf… | Continue reading
The New York Times measured pollution exposure during the day for two kids who live in New Delhi. Usually just described in terms of micrograms of particulate matter, the piece puts in more effort … | Continue reading
Ash Ngu for ProPublica and Sophie Cocke for Honolulu Star-Advertiser show the harm of building seawalls on Hawaii’s beaches. The walls protect luxury beachfront properties, but they have been… | Continue reading
Last year, in 2019, my main goals for FlowingData and work were to stay focused and make charts. I was satisfied with my progress, and for 2020, I had hoped to step that up with more depth and more… | Continue reading
The New York Times reconstructed the night. Based on a collection of court documents, ballistics reports, body camera footage, and interviews, they built a 3-D model of the scene depicting what app… | Continue reading
It used to be that climate changed seemed like something far off in the future, like something that would only affect future generations. But it’s looking more urgent these days. For Reuters,… | Continue reading