Making a convincing deepfake

For MIT Technology Review, Karen Hao looks into the process of artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund to produce a deepfake of Richard Nixon reading an alternate history of the moon landing: … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Reconstructing protests in Minneapolis using hundreds of livestreams

From a distance, it’s difficult to build an understanding of the scale and nature of protests. A soundbite here. A video clip there. So, to show the Minneapolis protests more completely, The … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

NBA playoff win probabilities, animated over time

FiveThirtyEight publishes win probabilities for NBA games throughout the season. During the playoffs, they show chances of winning each round, and with each game, the probabilities shift. Adam Pear… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Covid-19, the third leading cause of death

For Scientific American, Youyou Zhou made a line chart that shows cause of death in the United States, from 2015 up to present. Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in April and is now sitting a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ The Process 110 – Contrast

For two minutes, a black speck on a white background was all anyone could talk about. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Colour Controversy is a game of perception and labeling

Colour Controversy is a simple game that shows you a shade and asks you what color it is. The fun part is that the shades are usually in between two colors, say blue and green, and you can only cho… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Breaking down the $4 trillion bailout

Using a straightforward treemap, The Washington Post looks at where the $4 trillion bailout went. As you scroll, different categories highlight with accompanying text. This is probably the old man … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Presidential Plinko

To visualize uncertainty in election forecasts, Matthew Kay from Northwestern University used a Plinko metaphor. The height of each board is based on the distribution of the forecast, and each ball… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Shape of unemployment

For The New York Times, Ella Koeze looks at the various types of unemployment and how rates changed over the past six months. The piece uses area charts, with a focus on the shape over time. With t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Excel spreadsheet limit leads to 16,000 Covid-19 cases left off daily count

Microsoft Excel is useful for many things, but it has its limitations (like all software), which led to an undercount of 15,841 Covid-19 positive tests recorded by Public Health England. For the Gu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Coronavirus infection timeline

The timeline for a new infection isn’t the same for everyone. Some never show any symptoms. Some recover quickly. Some take months to recover. So, for The New York Times, Katherine J. Wu and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Seems relevant

Just looking back at the past eight or nine months of coronavirus posts for no particular reason. Some that stood out: When It Comes to Covid-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward How washing y… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Sonification of Covid-19 rates

You’ve seen the line charts showing case rates over time. The focus is on trends and whether things are getting better or worse. This piece by Jan Willem Tulp focuses on the current rates wit… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources – September 2020 Roundup

Here’s the good stuff for September 2020. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Millions of people experienced unhealthy air in 2020

NPR estimated how many people have experienced unhealthy air this year, largely in part to the wildfires on the west coast: An NPR analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality data … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Exhibition of historical visualization

RJ Andrews, in collaboration with the David Rumsey Map Center, curated a collection of historical data visualization: Data visualization leapt from its Enlightenment origins and into the minds of t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ How to Make a Heatmap in Excel

Heatmaps quickly translate data tables into a visual form, making them a great tool to explore a new dataset. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Air Quality Mapped Over Time

With wildfires burning in the western United States, smoke fills the air. This is an animation of the air quality during the past couple of months. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Timeline of the President’s taxes

The New York Times got a hold of the President’s tax records for the past two decades. They charted the reported gains and losses. It starts with an overview stacked area chart and then scrol… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

I am a book. I am a portal to the universe.

Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick have a new book out called I am a book. I am a portal to the universe. I’m different to any other book around today. I am not a book of infographics. I’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Covid-19 in your neighborhood

With recorded U.S. Covid-19 deaths passing the 200k mark, somehow the number still feels distant for many. The Washington Post, in collaboration with Lupa and the Google News Initiative, brings the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

What states are doing to make mail-in ballots clearer

Mail-in ballots can be rejected if they’re not filled out or mailed correctly. A small percentage of them always are. This year, when we’re talking millions of mail-in ballots, even a s… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ The Process 108 – Expected Value

Look only at uncertainty and it can feel overwhelming. Look at just averages and it’s not enough information. So, smoosh them together. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Google search trends dataset for Covid-19 symptoms

Google released a search trends dataset earlier this month. Using this dataset, Adam Pearce made an explorer to compare search volume over time: The COVID-19 Search Trends symptoms dataset shows ag… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Trump’s criminal justice ad spending on Facebook

The Marshall Project contrasted ad spending on Facebook by Trump’s campaign against Joe Biden’s: Our analysis found that of the $82 million Trump’s reelection campaign has spent o… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Census undercount

For NYT Opinion, Gus Wezerek and Andrew Whitby on what might happen if the count ends on September 30: Times Opinion predicted how many people would remain uncounted on Sept. 30, based on each stat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Shift of Covid-19 deaths to medium and small cities

When this all started, Covid-19 was impacting large cities at a much higher rate than everywhere else. This straightforward chart from NPR shows how the share of deaths in small and medium cities h… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Blacklight, a tool to see how the websites you visit are tracking you

Companies are tracking what you do online. You know this. But it can be a challenge to know the extent, because the methods are hidden on purpose. So The Markup built Blacklight: To investigate the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Randomization to preserve anonymity

Adam Pearce and Ellen Jiang for Google’s PAIR, explain how granular data can lead to easy identification of individuals and how randomization can help: Aggregate statistics about private info… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Map of climate threats where you live

For NYT Opinion, Stuart A. Thompson and Yaryna Serkez mapped the most predominant “climate threat” in each county: This picture of climate threats uses data from Four Twenty Seven, a co… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Smoke from the U.S. West Coast travels east and overseas

Smoke from the wildfires made its way to the other side of the country and over the ocean. Using data from NOAA, Reuters animated the smoke clouds over time: With climate change expected to exacerb… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Election night might take weeks

For The Washington Post, Ashlyn Still and Kevin Schaul charted how long it took for primary ballots to be counted in each state. The times might give a hint of what we’re in for on election n… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ The Process 107 – Misleading or Not? A Map of US Fires

Welcome to another edition of Misleading or Not, where we decide if a map is misleading or not. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Arquero, a JavaScript library to query and transform datasets

An often painful yet necessary step in visualization is to get your data in the right format. Arquero, from the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, aims to make this part of the process … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Friends sitcom transcript dataset

For your analytical perusal, Emil Hvitfeldt provides ten seasons’ worth of scripts from the Friends sitcom in an easy-to-use R package: The goal of friends to provide the complete script tran… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Elevation data molded in the base of a pint glass

North Drinkware molded Half Dome in the bottom of a hand-blown pint glass using elevation data from the United States Geological Survey. Wow. [via @blprnt] | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Mapping tree loss in rain forests over time

Bloomberg mapped tree loss between 2000 and 2019 in Brazil: “What we have seen in Brazil is that rainforest protection is a highly political issue,” says Gerlein-Safdi of the University of Michigan… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Tracking the mail

With mail-in ballots looking to be more common than ever this year, NYT’s The Upshot is tracking the mail: The data here, covering more than 28 million pieces of first-class letters tracked b… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Voting guide for your state

The Washington Post provides another straightforward voting guide, based on where you live and how you plan to vote. Election season is always interesting graphics-wise, because all of the news out… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Disappearing animals as a matrix of dots

Reddit user WhiteCheeks used dot density to show population counts of various animals. Each dot represents an animal. So animals with lower counts show less obviously. This is similar to the use of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ The Process 106 – Self-Imposed Visualization Constraints, for Focus and Fun

Constraints usually seem like a bad thing. Less freedom. You can’t do exactly what you want to do. You’re limited. But sometimes constraints can lead you towards unexpected paths. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

A Timeline of California Wildfires

The wind was blowing smoke and ash from wildfires further up north from where I live. The sky turned an eerie orange. I wondered about past fires and made the chart below. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Math behind wearing masks

The math behind wearing a mask can seem unintuitive at times. Minute Physics and Aatish Bhatia break it down in this illustrated video to show why wearing masks works: The premise is that thereR… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Telling stories in visual, data-driven essays

For The Pudding, Ilia Blinderman rounds out his three-part series on creating visual, data-driven essays. This last part in on the fuzziest task of telling stories: Storytelling, however, is much m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Picking the right colors for your charts

Picking colors for your charts can be tricky, especially when you’re starting a palette from scratch. For Datawrapper, Lisa Charlotte Rost has been writing guides on color as it pertains to p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Design your own election scenario

As we have seen, small shifts in voting behavior of various demographic groups can swing an election. The Washington Post provides an interactive that lets you shift these groups by both turnout an… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ The Process 105 – Piecing Together the Basics

You gotta walk before you crawl. Wait a minute. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Wanna know somefing?

From Reddit user wequiock_falls, “What I’m about to learn about after my kid says, ‘Wanna know somefing?’ Data collected over the course of 7 days.” Sounds about right… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago