✚ How to Make Difference Charts in Excel

Also known as a bivariate area chart, the plot type focuses on the comparison between two time series. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Drawing the coronavirus

What does the coronavirus look like? Rebekah Frumkin for The Paris Review highlights various illustrations and renderings, focusing on why each looks the way it does: The disease that has put the e… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Rivers know this

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Florida data manager fired over transparency of Covid-19 data

Rebekah Jones, GIS manager for the Florida Department of Health, was fired a couple of weeks ago, apparently for making the state’s Covid-19 data more accessible and transparent. Florida Toda… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Machine learning to make a dictionary of words that do not exist

Thomas Dimson trained a model to generate words that don’t exist in real life and definitions for said imaginary words. If you didn’t tell me the words were machine-generated, I’d… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Where unemployment benefits are higher than lost wages

Economists at the University of Chicago analyzed unemployment benefits from the CARES act and compared them against median salaries for different occupations and by state. FiveThirtyEight highlight… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

LEGO normal distribution animation

Let’s just animate all statistical concepts with LEGO from now on: My daughter loved the @FryRsquared Christmas Lectures so much she made this Lego Statistics Animation pic.twitter.com/caavfR… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

How experts use disease modeling to help inform policymakers

Harry Stevens and John Muyskens for The Washington Post put you in the spot of an epidemiologist receiving inquiries from policymakers about what might happen: Imagine you are an epidemiologist, an… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Map shows US typefaces named after cities in their geographic location

For The Statesider, Andy Murdock wondered how many typefaces are named after American locations. Then he put those typefaces on a map. So how many? The answer is 222. That’s not actually the answer… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Coronavirus Visual Rundown, Part II (The Process 089)

Hi, Nathan here. This is The Process, the weekly newsletter for FlowingData members where I look at charts closer. This issue is public, but if you’d like to support FlowingData, becoming a m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Explore Explain is a new visualization podcast about how the charts get made

From Andy Kirk, there’s a new visualization podcast in town: Explore Explain is a new data visualisation podcast and video series. Each episode is based on a conversation with visualisation d… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ How to Make Animated Histograms in R, with ggplot and gganimate

Make them move to show a shift in distributions over time. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Global warming color stripes, as decorative conversation starter

Ed Hawkins, who you might recognize from charts such as spiraling global temperature and the aforementioned temperature grid, encourages you to show your stripes. Select your region, and see how av… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Climate change displayed, with shower tiles

Based on a chart by Ed Hawkins, the shower wall of Gretchen Goldman and Tom Di Liberto transformed into a canvas to show global warming. Each row represents a country, and each cell — I mean … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Change in Instacart searches after the coronavirus

For Bloomberg, Ellen Huet and Lizette Chapman reported on the jolt for Instacart to shift into an essential service. Around the middle of the article is this chart that shows the shifts in what peo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Bread Scheduler

Is bread-making still a thing, or is that so two weeks ago? If you’re late to the sourdough train or still working out the feeding schedule, the Bread Scheduler by Stuart Thompson makes the t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Making stupid Excel bar charts

I’m just gonna put this right here, from @_daviant: “Another day another stupid Excel chart”. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Evaluating timeline layouts

To show events over time, you can use a timeline, which is often marks on a line that runs from less recent to more recent. But you can vary the shape. Sara Di Bartolomeo and her group researched t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

First unified geologic map of the moon

The USGS released a unified geologic map of the moon on a 1:5,000,000-scale — and the data to go with it: This new work represents a seamless, globally consistent, 1:5,000,000-scale geologic … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Famous Hope Quotes as Charts

I thought we (i.e. me) could use a break, so I made these abstract charts to represent the most popular quotes about hope. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Tornado Lines – Useful or Not? (The Process 088)

It looks like a tornado. It’s messy. It’s circular. It almost looks intentionally confusing. But how bad is it really? | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Who should receive care first, an ethical dilemma

At greater disparities between low resources and high volumes of sick people, doctors must decide who lives and who dies, which seems a moral burden with a single case, much less anything more. So … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Remix and make music with audio from the Library of Congress

Brian Foo is the current Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. His latest project is Citizen DJ, which lets you explore and remix audio from the Library: It invites the public to make … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Possible vaccine timelines

It’d be great if we could conjure a vaccine or a “cure” seemingly out of nowhere just like in the movies. Unfortunately, there’s a necessary process involved to make sure th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Coronavirus testing accuracy

Medical tests do not always provide certain results. Quartz illustrated this with the accuracy of a simulated antibody test that identifies 90% of those infected and 95% of those not infected: That… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Comparing Covid-19 models

FiveThirtyEight compared six Covid-19 models for a sense of where we might be headed. With different assumptions and varying math, the trajectories vary, but they at least provide clues so that pol… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Playable simulations to decide what happens next

The timelines keep shifting and people are getting antsy for many valid (and not-so-valid) reasons. When will this end? Will we ever get “normal” again? At this point, simulations are p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Looking for generational gaps in music

Inspired by the genre of YouTube videos where younger people listen to older music, The Pudding is running a project to find the generational music gaps. Enter your age, songs play, and you say if … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Neural network generates convincing songs by famous singers

Jukebox from OpenAI is a generative model that makes music in the same styles as many artists you’ll probably recognize: To train this model, we crawled the web to curate a new dataset of 1.2… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools, Datasets, and Resources – April 2020 Roundup

Hi, Nathan here. This is The Process, the weekly newsletter for FlowingData where I talk about how the charts get made. I hope you’re well. My looping soundtrack has apparently converged to B… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Who Funds the World Health Organization

A couple of weeks ago — or maybe it was a couple of years ago, I’m not sure — the administration announced it would withdraw funding from the World Health Organization. Here’s wha… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Text-to-speech models trained on celebrity voices

The Vocal Synthesis channel on YouTube trains text-to-speech models using publicly available celebrity voices. Then using this new computer-generated voice, the celebrities “recite” var… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Pretend mall to show at-risk brands

Many brands that were at-risk before the pandemic or ran with low profit margins might not make it through this thing. The Washington Post used a faux mall map to show the levels of risk: Companies… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Text from press briefings categorized

The New York Times went through the words using during press briefings, pulling out five main categories and highlighting one in particular: Viewed simply as a pattern of Mr. Trump’s speech, the se… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Excess deaths

We cannot know the true number of coronavirus-related deaths. Maybe it’s because of a lack of tests. Maybe cause of death is ambiguous because of pre-existing conditions. So, for a different … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Search trends during the pandemic

As you would imagine, what we search for online shifted over the past few months. The unknowns push information gathering. Schema Design, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative and Axios,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Visualization helping us during the pandemic

Hayleigh Moore for the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland on visualization and the pandemic: With new updates developing by the hour amidst the evolving COVID-19 pandemic,… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Testing the infinite monkey theorem

If you have a room of monkeys hitting keys on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, do you eventually end up with a Shakespeare play? For The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas put … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Charting for Others (The Process 086)

There’s a new tool-agnostic course now available for members. Check it out now. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

How We Reopen

Vi Hart, along with a group of experts from different political backgrounds and fields, proposes a plan for how we reopen: | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

People of the Pandemic, a game that simulates social distancing in your ZIP Code

People of the Pandemic is a game that lets you choose how many times you leave the house to get food or go for a walk. Using data for population and hospital beds in your ZIP code, the game then si… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Missing deaths

The daily counts for coronavirus deaths rely on reporting, testing, and available estimates, which means the numbers we see are probably lower than the real counts. So, for The New York Times, Jin … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Change in Google searches since the virus

The coronavirus changed what information we search for. Has anyone been more interested in making masks or hand sanitizer in the history of the world? For The Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers compare… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Game of Distraction

They say a watched pot never boils. So here’s a game where you try to make the pot boiling by looking somewhere else. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Sheltering in small places

For many, sheltering in place means sheltering in relatively small places. Reuters zoomed in on the tight quarters in Tokyo, Japan. Not much room for movement. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ Wide View (The Process 085)

The data might exist on a single page or in a single file, but there’s always more to it. Take a step outside for a better view. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

Historical data visualization panel

Manuel Lima hosted a free online panel with Michale Friendly and Sandra Rendgen historical data visualization. It already happened, but you can listen to the archived version: Human beings have bee… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago

✚ How to Visualize Anomalies in Time Series Data in R, with ggplot

Quickly see what’s below and above average through the noise and seasonal trends. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 4 years ago