✚ Visualization Tools and Resources Roundup – December 2020

Here’s the good stuff for December in the last issue of the year. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2020

It’s been a year. We saw a lot of charts. These are the best ones. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Evolution of coronavirus strains

Reuters looked at how seven main strains of the virus evolved around the world: The analysis shows there are currently seven main strains of the virus. The original strain, detected in the Chinese … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Historical cost of light

These days, most of us don’t have to do much to turn on a light when it’s dark out. But what if I told you it used to take a lot more time and money to get that sweet artificial light? … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Who catches the most fish

Using data from Global Fishing Watch, Hayley Warren and Ian Wishart for Bloomberg mapped the predominant country for fishing in European Union and British waters. There’s disagreement between… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

1 in 5 prisoners had Covid-19, a grid map

The Marshall Project and The Associated Press report on the Covid-19 rates in prison, which are multiple times greater than the general population. Katie Park shows the regional variation with this… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Tracking world’s biggest iceberg

The world’s biggest iceberg, A68a, is on track to crash into a remote island in the Atlantic. For Reuters, Marco Hernandez and Cassandra Garrison show the path, the scale, and what might happ… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ Knowing Nothing (Process 119)

Obviously, knowing nothing can be a negative, but some of my favorite work came about when I didn’t know how to do something or what to expect. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Blob Opera is a machine learning model you can make music with

David Li, in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, made a fun experiment to play with: We developed a machine learning model trained on the voices of four opera singers in order to create an … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Basketball court designed as a national park map

Kirk Goldsberry, whose basketball charts you might recognize, made the Naismith International Park Map: This map blends two of my passions: cartography and hoops. The elevation surface on the map i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ How to Make an Animated Beeswarm Chart

Beeswarm charts are useful to highlight individual categories or entities. Animating them can help highlight change over time. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Data for all of the referee calls in NBA games

Owen Phillips compiled per game and cumulative foul calls for all NBA referees between the 2016-17 and 2019-20 seasons. On its own, I’m not sure it’s that exciting, but if you’re … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Infrared to show air particles from your talk hole

I’m sure you know this already, but just in case, air particles come out of your mouth when you talk, cough, etc. The Washington Post used an infrared camera to demonstrate: To visually illus… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Unemployment and Occupation

Unemployment has hit some industries more than others. Here’s how the most recent estimates compare against last year’s. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Charting and ranking apocalyptic events

For Domain of Science, Dominic Walliman attempts to chart all of the deadly events that threaten humanity on a scatterplot. On the horizontal axis he places number of casualties. On the vertical he… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

✚ The Process 118 – Maybe a Bar Chart Really Would Be Better

As visualization practitioners, we tend to sway towards the novel, but bar charts are still good. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Visualizing 16th century letter correspondence of the Tudor government

Kim Albrecht, Ruth Ahnert, and Sebastian Ahnert visualized the network of communications over time and space: The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. T… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Where ICUs are near capacity

The New York Times mapped the seven-day average of ICU bed occupancy rates: More than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds, federal… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

NBA Players Traded, Historical Percentages

It seems like there’s been more player movement than usual over the years. Didn’t players used to play on a single team for the entirety of their careers? | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Bill Nye on masks, with a map and some props

Talking about the effectiveness of masks, Bill Nye uses a map and some props to show mask-wearing against infection. @billnye I don’t know who needs to hear this but… ##masks work. Wear one. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

House raided of fired Florida data manager in charged of Covid-19 dashboard

Jeffrey Schweers for Tallahassee Democrat: State police brandishing firearms Monday raided the Tallahassee home of Rebekah Jones, the former Department of Health employee who built the state’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Interactive explainer for how cameras and lenses work

We use our cameras all of the time, and it almost seems like magic when you press that button and somehow an image is captured. But of course it’s not magic. Bartosz Ciechanowski provides a d… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Defining essential worker to distribute vaccine

Matthew Conlen, in an article by Abby Goodnough and Jan Hoffman for NYT, charted essential and frontline workers by industry. With limited doses, states have to decide who gets the vaccine after he… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Data Sketches, the book

Data Sketches was a one-year visualization collaboration between Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu that started in 2016. Each month they separately visualized a topic, and at the end of each month they&… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Vaccine contracts

Bloomberg is tracking nine coronavirus vaccines around the world. In addition to the approval process, they’re also tracking the procurement and distribution from companies to countries. Bill… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Through the eyes of the algorithm

Eugene Wei looks closer at the algorithms that drive TikTok and how its design provided an effective feedback loop: But for TikTok (or Douyin, its Chinese clone), who needed an algorithm that would… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Your place in the vaccine line

Using estimates from the Surgo Foundation and Ariadne Labs, Stuart A. Thompson for NYT Opinion shows how many people are in front of you to get the coronavirus vaccine. Just enter your age, if you&… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Searching for Blue Moon ice cream

Daniel Huffman grew up with an ice cream flavor called Blue Moon. Where he’s from, it’s a common menu item, so he figured it was common nationally. Nope. So Huffman did some cartographi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

A game where you get to be a faceworker and mess with an AI system

Kyle McDonald, in collaboration with Greg Borenstein, Evelyn Masso, and Fei Lui, made Facework. It’s a game that imagines a platform where people use their faces in a gig economy and you̵… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Scented candle reviews on Amazon and Covid-19

Prompted by a tweet about scented candles without smell and Covid-19, Kate Petrova plotted Amazon reviews for scented and unscented candles over time. Notice the downward trend for scented candles … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Jobs of a data scientist

Roger Peng outlines four main roles of a data scientist: If you’re reading this and find yourself saying “I’m not an X” where X is either scientist, statistician, systems en… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Mapping 250,000 people

As we’ve talked about before, it can be hard to really understand the scale of big numbers. So when we hear that over 250,000 people died because of the coronavirus, it can be hard to concept… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Leftover Turkey Flowchart

I roasted a turkey. There were a lot of leftovers. But my mom taught me to never waste. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 3 years ago

Mapping 250,000 people

Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

What to Call Your Distant Relative

When you have a big family, it’s a challenge to figure out how everyone is related. So here are some charts to help you figure it out. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Fake faces created by AI and where this might be headed

It’s grown easier and easier to generate fake faces with AI. For The New York Times, Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White demonstrate the tech with a slick interactive. Quickly adjust age, eye, mood… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Where there are hospital staff shortages

Reporting for NPR, Sean McMinn and Selena Simmons-Duffins on staffing shortages: On data availability: This is the first time the federal agency has released this data, which includes limited repor… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Small gatherings can be dangerous too

A small gathering of 10 people or fewer can seem like a low-risk activity, and at the individual level, it’s lower risk than going to a big birthday party. But when a lot of people everywhere… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Analysis of representation in crossword puzzles

For The Pudding, Michelle McGhee analyzed representation in crossword puzzles. Some crossword publications do better than others. As of December 2019, The USA Today puzzle is edited by Erik Agard, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources – November 2020 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

State restrictions and hospitalizations

The University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government defined an index to track containment measures for the coronavirus. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby and Rich Harris plotted the in… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Voting gains for 2020, compared to 2016 election

For The New York Times, Ford Fessenden, Lazaro Gamio and Rich Harris go with a Dorling cartogram to look at the votes gained per county in the 2020 election, compared against the 2016 election. As … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Recap of all the election maps and charts

Alan McConchie from Stamen recaps the wide array of maps and charts that came out before, during, and after election night: This year we saw continued refinement of traditional election maps styles… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

U.S. military buys location data from apps

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: Some app developers Motherboard spoke to were not aware who their users’ location data ends up with, and even if a user examines an app’s privacy … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

An atlas for the world’s development indicators

The World Bank tracks global development through a number of indicators. (You can see and download much of the data through their catalog.) With a story-based approach, they published an atlas for … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Votes that won the presidency

Voter turnout this election was higher than it’s been in a long time, but the winner margins were still small. Alyssa Fowers, Atthar Mirza and Armand Emamdjomeh for The Washington Post showed… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Debunking claims of election rigging

There’s a video (one of too many I am sure) going around that “shows” election rigging. Statistician Kristian Lum shows, with good ol’ basic math and R plots, why the “… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Coronavirus cases rising in prisons

Coronavirus cases are rising (again), which includes prisoners and prison staff. The Marshall Project has been tracking cases since March and provides a state-by-state rundown: New infections this … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago