To increase anonymity in the Census records, the bureau is testing an algorithm that removes real people and inserts imaginary people in various locations. As you can imagine, this carries a set of… | Continue reading
Welcome to another episode of Misleading or Not? where we look at a chart and decide if it’s misleading or not. | Continue reading
For the Financial Times, Alan Smith and Steven Bernard traced the history of railroad construction in America and mapped it over time. Literally. Bernard used digitized versions of old maps and tra… | Continue reading
From Lusion, CineShader is a fun editor for those who are familiar with Shadertoy: CineShader is a real-time 3D shader visualiser. It leverages the Shadertoy.com API to bring thousands of existing … | Continue reading
Google Maps incorporates data from smartphones to estimate traffic in any given location. Artist Simon Weckert used this tidbit to throw the statistical models off the scent. With a wagon of 99 sma… | Continue reading
Michael Keller released a new version of Layer Cake: Layer Cake is a graphics framework built on top of Svelte. It measures your target div and your data and creates scales that stay synced on layo… | Continue reading
I know you don’t get enough election coverage these days and are probably like, “I wish there was a way I could be reminded of who’s running with bouncing heads across my screen w… | Continue reading
Every month I collect resources and tools to help you better visualize data. Here’s the good stuff for January 2020. | Continue reading
Flow Fields, a generative art tool by Michael Freeman, lets you adjust various parameters, such as color, smoothness, and fluctuations, and the flows just keep coming. Pretty. The code is up on Git… | Continue reading
Network graphs are a good way to find structure and relationships within hierarchical data. Here are several ways to do it. | Continue reading
For ProPublica, Ellis Simani and Ken Schwencke compiled an interactive database that you can search: ProPublica reporters spent months collecting the lists as they were originally released by each … | Continue reading
Noah Veltman just posted a dataset of 23,463 personalized license plate applications that were flagged for additional review by the state of California from 2015 to 2016. Casually scrolling through… | Continue reading
Sometimes illustrating scientific findings is a challenge. Sometimes the illustrations are published anyways, because there are no more options. Sometimes those illustrations end up on a Twitter fe… | Continue reading
Over a year ago, Google released Dataset Search in public beta. The goal was to index datasets across the internets to make them easier to find. It came out of beta: Based on what we’ve learn… | Continue reading
Using one of my recent projects as an example, I describe my non-elegant process of making a quick chart. | Continue reading
So get this. There are these things called radio stations that broadcast music using frequency modulation. They call it “FM radio.” You don’t download or stream the music, and you… | Continue reading
File another one under the sounds-good-on-paper-but-really-challenging-in-practice. Kashmir Hill, for The New York Times, describes the challenges of new laws that allow users to request the data t… | Continue reading
For The New York Times, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries looked at the current state of facial recognition in law enforcement: Officials in Florida say that they query the system 4,600 times a month. But… | Continue reading
Based on names data from the Social Security Administration, we look at trends, how common your name is, and how similar it is to others. | Continue reading
Following up on his mini-app to draw ridgeline maps for elevation, Andrei Kashcha made a tool to draw a streets map of anywhere in the world. Enter a city, and using data from OpenStreetMap, you… | Continue reading
For the Absurd America section of The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind: Are cows better represented in the Senate than people? | Continue reading
A 3-D rendered map of Australia depicting a month of bushfires grew popular last week. Some thought it misleading. Others thought it was okay. It’s probably somewhere in the middle of that. | Continue reading
The Washington Post asked Democratic candidates a series of policy questions. To see which one agrees with you most, the Post made a quiz: Now, it’s your turn to answer. Below are 20 questions we f… | Continue reading
When I think government structure, I tend to think in general overviews where you have some branches that check and balance each other. But when you look closer, within organizations that make up t… | Continue reading
From 1928, the year of the first Academy Awards, to 2019, there have been 455 nominations for Best Director. Of those, 18 of them went to non-white men. | Continue reading
In 2007, Noah Kalina posted a time-lapse video showing a picture of himself every day for six years. Pop culture swallowed it up. There was even a Simpsons parody with Homer. After another six year… | Continue reading
It’s difficult to emphasize how much life changes when a child comes into the picture. Caitlin Hudon made a chart to show how her daily schedule shifted dramatically. For a while, it seems li… | Continue reading
Based on a Morning Consult/Politico survey, most people don’t know where Iran is: As tensions between the United States and Iran rise in the aftermath of the American drone strike that killed… | Continue reading
Outside of Australia, it can be a challenge to get a grasp of how bad the bushfires actually are. There have been some attempts that overlay a map of Australia over various locations, but they̵… | Continue reading
For those new to visualization, learning all of the methods, implementations, tools, and guidelines can seem like a daunting task. Not to mention everything that happens before the actual visualizi… | Continue reading
The chart type can be used to show patterns over time and relationships between variables. This is a comprehensive introduction to making them using two common libraries. | Continue reading
In 2018, there was a squirrel census count at Central Park in New York. New York Times graphics editor Denise Lu participated in the citizen science project “to collect the kind of data that … | Continue reading
The New York Times zoomed in on southeastern Australia where the fires have hit the worst. They also used small multiples to show the scale of the fires the past few months against previous years. | Continue reading
With all of the maps of fire in Australia, be sure to check out this piece by Georgina Rannard for BBC News on how some of the maps can easily be misinterpreted when seen out of context. | Continue reading
For The Guardian, Niko Kommenda and Josh Holder provide a visual guide to the bushfires in Australia: Satellite data from Nasa showed a stark increase in the number of fire detections in November a… | Continue reading
From Kim Warp for The New Yorker. Ha. Ha. It’s funny because it’s true. It reminds me of Amanda Cox’s dress size graphic for the NYT. [Thanks, Mike] | Continue reading
Ridgeline charts or frequency trails use parallel lines that overlap on the fluctuations, which creates a 3-D effect at the peaks. Andrei Kashcha used this method to show elevation around the world… | Continue reading
One of the best ways to feel old is to look to your past and realize how long ago it was. Wait Buy Why demonstrates with a bunch of timeline splits. For example: “Remember when Jurassic Park,… | Continue reading
There’s a technical component of visualization that leans towards code, data formatting, and clicking the right buttons in the right order. Then there’s everything else that makes okay … | Continue reading
For The Upshot, Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui looked for major urban developments in the United States by comparing satellite imagery of past to present: To grasp the scale of this decade of chang… | Continue reading
My main goal for FD this year was to make charts. I hoped to make one chart per week, along with the newsletter and tutorials, which would force me to focus and spend less time dwelling on a datase… | Continue reading
A file leaked to The New York Times contained location traces of 12 million unique smartphones. Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel went digging: The data set is large enough that it surely point… | Continue reading
The decade is almost done. You’re sitting there and you’re thinking: “I wish I could easily access the scripts from all seasons of The Office so that I could analyze the dialogue … | Continue reading
For The New York Times, Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi went to oilfields in Texas with an infrared camera to look for methane leaks. Okay, important topic here, and the contrast between regular… | Continue reading
One way to gauge the amount of ice in the Arctic is to look at the average age of the ice. From the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, the map above shows the estimated age of ice on a monthly b… | Continue reading
Pew Research Center analyzed online sermons in U.S. searches, taking a closer look at what people typically hear across religions: For instance, the distinctive words (or sequences of words) that o… | Continue reading
For The Washington Post, Tim Meko and Lauren Tierney: Before the 1930s, Christmas trees typically were cut down on an individual’s property or out in the wild. Now, tree farms in all 50 states (yes… | Continue reading
For Scientific American, Nicholas Rougeux and Jen Christiansen show the shift in hues for the magazine’s covers over the past 175 years. The changes serve as a proxy for technology advancemen… | Continue reading