Stephen M. Stigler argues that data have a limited shelf life. The abstract: Data, unlike some wines, do not improve with age. The contrary view, that data are immortal, a view that may underlie th… | Continue reading
In a follow-up to a map from a few years back, Andy Woodruff provides a gripe assistant tool for Daylight Saving Time. Plug in your preferences for an ideal day, and you can see if you’re in … | Continue reading
I always enjoy me some scale of space graphics. Neal Agarwal made an interactive browser that starts at astronaut scale and quickly zooms you out to larger objects with a fisheye view. See also: if… | Continue reading
Laughter online is full of nuances. A capitalization of some letters or a single space can change the meaning completely. Good thing The Pudding is examining the subject. | Continue reading
Every month, I collect new visualization tools, code, and datasets, along with helpful resources. Here’s the good stuff for October. | Continue reading
ProPublica, with The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, estimated chemical concentrations in a highly polluted area along the Mississippi River that will probably get worse soon: The industrial stret… | Continue reading
It was reported that 1 in 6 millennials have at least $100,000 saved. Is this right? It seems high. I looked at the data to find out and then at all of the age groups. | Continue reading
This month PG&E has been shutting down power to thousands of households in northern California because of high winds and wildfire risk. A lot of electrical equipment in the area is dated and in… | Continue reading
I feel like satellite imagery has upped its skillset in recent years. According to Rob Simmon, the image below from Planet of the Kincade fire in Sonoma, California was taken from 600 miles away in… | Continue reading
You can see the time-lapsed imagery with this browser. [via @weatherdak] | Continue reading
For The Atlantic, Ian Bogost on communicating complex ideas to an audience: One thing you learn when writing for an audience outside your expertise is that, contrary to the assumption that people m… | Continue reading
Charts can reveal truths that we never would see otherwise, but they can also be misused to show us something in the data that doesn’t reflect reality. Alberto Cairo’s new book How Char… | Continue reading
Marion Rouayroux, a graphic designer and a big fan of the show Friends, collated a bunch of data about the sitcom. Then she visualized the data with a series of information graphics. | Continue reading
Almost all of my visualization projects that use data from the Census Bureau comes via IPUMS. In this guide, I provide five steps to getting the data you need using their tools. | Continue reading
Analysis and visualization are often a messy process that never matches up to the step-by-step guides you read, but that’s normal. | Continue reading
For Datawrapper, Lisa Charlotte Rost outlines the steps to prepare and clean your data in Excel or Google Spreadsheets. From the beginning: When you download an Excel file, it often has multiple sh… | Continue reading
Overview is an ongoing project that uses a zoomed out view for a new perspective on the world: Seeing the Earth from a great distance has been proven to stimulate awe, increase desire to collaborat… | Continue reading
For commuters, the farther away you live from the workplace, the earlier you have to leave your house to get to work on time. How much does that start time change the farther out you get? | Continue reading
On Multiple Views, the Interactions Lab talks about their experience as a design studio and how quickly implementations can change when you introduce real data into the system: It’s easy to assume … | Continue reading
For Tampa Bay Times, Tracey McManus and Eli Murray delve into the purchasing of properties Clearwater, Florida by the Church of Scientology: The Church of Scientology and companies run by its membe… | Continue reading
Microsoft just open sourced their data exploration tool known as SandDance: For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting dat… | Continue reading
Data represents the real world, and visualization represents data. But sometimes data and the real world disagree with each other. | Continue reading
When it comes to meaningful visualization, context is everything. Richard Brath, at the 2018 Information+ Conference, looks back on historical visualization approaches and how they might be applied… | Continue reading
One person’s long commute is another’s dream. Another person’s normal might be someone else’s nightmare. What counts as a long commute depends on where you live. | Continue reading
A study found that a hospital program significantly reduced the number of hospitalizations and emergency department visits. Great. But then the researchers realized that the data was recoded incorr… | Continue reading
FiveThirtyEight has been predicting NBA games for a few years now, based on a variant of Elo ratings, which in turn have roots in ranking chess players. But for this season, they have a new metric … | Continue reading
For The Washington Post, Lauren Tierney and Joe Fox mapped fall foliage colors across the United States: Forested areas in the United States host a variety of tree species. The evergreens shed leav… | Continue reading
Visualization has a way of making things feel more concrete and definite. So how is it that interpretation gets so fuzzy? | Continue reading
Here in northern California, PG&E is shutting off power to thousands of households in efforts to prevent wildfires. Luckily, the area I live is just outside of the shutoff areas, but for others… | Continue reading
A quick annotation by Jonnie Hallman on Twitter: “GitHub is really good at visualizing burnout.” | Continue reading
As discussed previously, the “impeach this” map has some issues. Mainly, it equates land area to votes, which makes for a lot of visual attention to counties that are big even though no… | Continue reading
Using the library command-line gets you more flexibility to highlight the important parts of the data. | Continue reading
Kelly Martin died of cancer on September 30. She was able to enjoy her final days at home, and as she knew the end was near, she kept track of her drug doses in a dashboard: Brain tumors are unpred… | Continue reading
David Leonhardt, for The New York Times, discusses the relatively low tax rates for the country’s 400 wealthiest households. The accompanying animated line chart by Stuart A. Thompson shows h… | Continue reading
Visualization is a relatively new field. Sort of. The increased availability of data has pushed visualization forward in more recent years, but its roots go back centuries. Michael Friendly and How… | Continue reading
Toph Tucker used to make graphics for Bloomberg Businessweek. Now he does enterprise visualization for finance. He wrote about the major differences between the two jobs. On the iconic Bloomberg Te… | Continue reading
The visualizations are used and read differently, which requires that you approach their design differently. | Continue reading
How many US cities can you name? Here’s a quick and fun game by Ian Fisher to find out. Simply start entering as many as you can think of and rack up population counts as a sort of point syst… | Continue reading
Philip Bump explains why the “impeach this” map is a bit dubious: By now, this criticism of electoral maps is taught in elementary schools. Or, at least, it should be. Those red countie… | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, The Washington Post visualized 13,000 school districts using moving bubbles. Post graphics reporter Armand Emamdjomeh describes how they did it. Saving this for later. | Continue reading
This is perfect. Willikin Wolf made characters out of two dots moving along their paths of productivity and wages. Something’s wrong pic.twitter.com/tMhNPk85pH— Willikin Wolf (@WillikinWolf) … | Continue reading
In 2008, the World Wildlife Fund ran a campaign that used pixelation to represent the number of animals left for endangered species. One pixel represents an animal, so an image appears more pixelat… | Continue reading
Thomas Lin Pedersen has been sharing his generative art pieces as of late: All my systems and visualisations are programmed in R, an open source programming language for statistics and data analysi… | Continue reading
Every month I collect the latest visualization tools and resources on how to make the most of your data. Here’s the good stuff for September. | Continue reading
The suffixes on street names can say a lot about a neighborhood. A Boulevard elicits a business-centric area whereas a Road or Court might mean a more residential area. So, Erin Davis mapped the su… | Continue reading
Continuing his analysis of street grid-iness in cities around the world, Geoff Boeing sorted cities by the amount of order in their street networks: Across these study sites, US/Canadian cities hav… | Continue reading
For UnHerd, Tom Chivers, talks about David Spiegelhalter’s new book and why every statistical headline deserves a grain of salt. One way to make sure things check out: As a non-mathematician,… | Continue reading
GPX Jewelry by Rachel Binx lets you turn your GPS traces into jewelry. Just upload a GPX file from, say, your fitness app or Apple Watch, choose your finish, and you’ve got yourself a persona… | Continue reading