As I do every year, I picked my ten favorite visualization projects. Here they are in no particular order. | Continue reading
Every month I collect links to new tools, datasets, and visualization resources. Here’s the good stuff for December 2019 and the last roundup for the decade. | Continue reading
Our brains are pretty good at finding patterns, but it has some blindspots and then we get confused. The Illusion of the Year contest targets those blindspots. This year’s winner shows a rota… | Continue reading
Standardized ratings are a challenge, because they often try to encapsulate many variables into a single variable. On the upside, a single score is quick and easy to see, but on the downside, varia… | Continue reading
By way of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, ProPublica and The Boston Globe requested records from each state. They compiled the many documents into a single dataset: In each record, CA… | Continue reading
Color scheme selections are nice and all, but they’re even better when viewed in context. It’s part of ColorBrewer’s charm, in the context of maps. Happy Hues offers color schemes… | Continue reading
Layout multiple charts in a single view. Then adjust the scales appropriately for maximum comparability and a unified graphic. | Continue reading
Layering time series data or distributions with this method can change the feel and aesthetic versus a multi-line chart or small multiples. In some cases, frequency trails let you show more in less… | Continue reading
We looked at shifts in job distribution over the past several decades, but it was difficult to see by how much each occupation group changed individually. This chart makes the changes more obvious. | Continue reading
Datawrapper, a focused web tool that makes online charts easier to put together and share, changed their pricing structure. There used to be a couple of paid tiers for individuals and small teams, … | Continue reading
For Reuters, Feilding Cage describes a weather time machine project by NOAA that uses old shipping logs to build climate models for the 19th century: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions … | Continue reading
The dataisbeautiful subreddit announced a moratorium on the ever popular bar chart race. The frequency of submissions that used the method got out of hand and spam made it all the less savory. Stil… | Continue reading
Satellite Studio made a map thing that generates haikus based on OpenStreetMap data and your location. From the announcement: [W]e automated making haikus about places. Looking at every aspect of t… | Continue reading
In the 1950s, almost half of all employed people were either in farming or manufacturing. As you can imagine, work changed a bit over the years. | Continue reading
Janelle Shane applied her know-how with artificial intelligence to generate new types of pies that the world has never seen: People wonder about what it would be like if a super-intelligent AI deci… | Continue reading
In this video, Dominic Walliman attempts to illustrate and explain all of the known things in the universe. There’s also a poster version. | Continue reading
Many things get stuck in people’s bodies. This is the percentage breakdown for the most common objects that end up in the emergency room. | Continue reading
Every month I collect new visualization tools, datasets, and resources. Here is the good stuff for November. | Continue reading
The oceans are deep. But how deep and what’s down there? Neal Agarwal provides this piece, The Deep Sea, that scales the depths of the ocean to your browser window. Scroll, scroll, and then s… | Continue reading
High air pollution can lead to serious health risks, but you can’t usually see particulate matter floating in the air around you. So we have no base for comparison and only an abstract sense … | Continue reading
Inpredictable, a sports analytics site by Michael Beuoy, tracks win probabilities of NBA games going back to the 1996-97 season. When a team is up by a lot, their probability of winning is high, an… | Continue reading
Fill areas with varying line density to give more or less visual attention. With geographic maps, the technique is especially useful to adjust for population density. | Continue reading
From Google Arts & Culture: We came together with The Business of Fashion to view their collection of 140,000 photos of runway looks from almost 4,000 fashion shows around the world. If you cou… | Continue reading
Robert Bosch likes to use the Traveling Salesman Problem to draw famous portraits with a single continuous line. Nice. If you want to fall down a Traveling Salesman rabbit hole, be sure to check ou… | Continue reading
Joshua Rosenberg describes his one-day experience teaching R to 7th graders: [T]he activity worked albeit, as a very gradual introduction to using R. In combination with starting with modest goals,… | Continue reading
From the Voyageurs Wolf Project, a map shows the travels of a lone wolf over an 11-month period. Check out the animated version for full effect. | Continue reading
For Quartz, Dan Kopf and Jenny Anderson on how time spent with kids changes with age: In the very beginning, it’s all about physical care, otherwise known as the stuff that makes your arms tired. A… | Continue reading
Reddit user harpalss animated hours of day light by latitude and day of year. Just let it hypnotize you. They used this formula to calculate daylight hours. | Continue reading
False. | Continue reading
Geotab made a rough estimate of the quietest route in each state, based on average traffic. The methodology: To find the quietest road in each US state, we gathered the latest available (2015) traf… | Continue reading
Summarizing a talk by Xaquín G.V., Natalie Gerhardstein for Delano: Among González’ takeaways were that, in order to avoid misunderstandings or bias in data visualisation, it helps to be aware of t… | Continue reading
From Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist. Maybe a dashboard isn’t the answer you’re looking for. | Continue reading
Visualize rankings over time instead of absolute values to focus on order instead of the magnitude of change. | Continue reading
Easily compare multiple categories and spot differences between two or more series. | Continue reading
Stating the obvious, salaries vary across occupations. Here are some charts that show by how much for 800 of them. | Continue reading
Matt Daniels compared rappers’ vocabularies to find out who knows the most words. Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, s… | Continue reading
Using estimates from the Database of Road Transportation Emissions, Nadja Popovich and Denise Lu for The New York Times mapped auto emissions at high granularity. Popovich described their process o… | Continue reading
This week I reminisce back to when I didn’t know anything about visualization, and all I wanted to do was solve analysis problems. Also, some fun updates on the way, exclusively for members. | Continue reading
For Knowable Magazine, Betsy Mason looks at the state of (not so good) data visualization in science and offers some direction for how it can improve: [S]cience is littered with poor data visualiza… | Continue reading
It’s time to kick the tires on some new tools. I’ve been running FlowingData Membership for almost eight years now, and one of the main benefits is that you get unlimited access to step… | Continue reading
You’ve probably seen the composite map of lights at night from NASA. It looks a lot like population density. Tim Wallace adjusted the map for population, so that you can see (roughly) the are… | Continue reading
There are a lot of variables to consider, but for people of middle income, here’s a suggestion, based on when you start saving and when you want to retire. | Continue reading
For xkcd fans, here’s a JavaScript library by Tim Qian that lets you style your charts like xkcd. There’s something about sketchy, comic-style charts that makes the data feel more appro… | Continue reading
People tend to have more money saved up over time, but range and variation also grow, and often it’s not enough. | Continue reading
Elizabeth Warren has big plans, and they would cost a lot with a big shift in government spending. The New York Times breaks it down. I realize the topic here is important, but NYT’s bubble g… | Continue reading
There are many tools to clean up your data, and they can be helpful with the right dataset and situation. I tend to stick to a small handful. Here’s what works for me. | Continue reading
Randall Munroe of xkcd was on the Data Stories podcast. He talks about his work, his process, and communicating complex ideas to a wide audience. It’s amazing how much of his process overlaps… | Continue reading
Interested in reviews on the Sephora website for waterproof makeup, Connie Ye figured she might as well scrape all of the reviews and filter for the ones that mention crying: I ended up scraping ab… | Continue reading