Over the past four years, Planet deployed 293 satellites in low orbit to take a snapshot of Earth every day. This animation by Nadieh Bremer shows how the snapshot gets pieced together. Most of me … | Continue reading
This animated interactive explains how a research group is using light to measure the speed of objects millions of miles away. Light that is farther away will appear to be a different color than a … | Continue reading
Survey participants were asked to grade fast food burger restaurants on eight criteria. This is how each restaurant ranked. | Continue reading
In a compare-your-preconceptions-against-reality quiz, The Upshot asks, “Are you rich?” Enter your nearest metro area, income, and what you consider to be rich. See where you actually l… | Continue reading
Gerry uses congressional district boundaries as letters. Hahahahaha. Oh wait. | Continue reading
Every month I collect useful visualization tools and resources. Here’s the good stuff for July. | Continue reading
Here are the estimates from the Current Population Survey for the most recent time segment between 2017 and 2018. | Continue reading
By shifting the baseline to a reference point, you can focus a line chart on relative change, which can improve the visibility of smaller categories. | Continue reading
Using blobbies with varying traits such as size, speed, and food gathering ability, Primer simulates natural selection in the explainer video below. Blobby. | Continue reading
Lauren Baldo illustrated how he applies color theory in his paintings and illustrations. You don’t have to travel far to see how this transfers to visualization. | Continue reading
When staying at national parks, some people choose a tent. Some bring an RV. Others might stay in a lodge or sleep under the stars. Of course, it depends on where they stay and the weather during a… | Continue reading
Andrew DeGraff painted maps that show the geography in movies and their characters’ paths. Above is the map for Back to the Future, with 1985 Hill Valley on the top and 1955 Hill Valley on th… | Continue reading
Seung Lee collected sleep data for his son’s first year. Then he knitted a blanket to visualize the data. The blanket is impressive. Collecting a baby’s sleep data for a year? More so. | Continue reading
Jason Forrest delves into the history of a single Isotype and a bit of the general background on the picture language: Isotype is a highly refined picture language designed for educating people wit… | Continue reading
Based on data from Gridded Population of the World, geographer Garrett Dash Nelson calculated the square kilometers in major cities with the highest population density. On CityLab: In the interacti… | Continue reading
Visualization is still a relatively young field, so people learn about and how to visualize data in a lot of different ways. For instance, there weren’t any visualization-specific courses whe… | Continue reading
Airport runways orient certain directions that correlate with wind direction in the area. It helps planes land and take off more easily. So, when you map runways around the world, you also get wind… | Continue reading
Wondering whether if a player’s shot improves over the course of his career, Peter Beshai shows shot performance for all players from the 2018-19 season: To understand whether or not a player… | Continue reading
They provide an anchor in your charts, and you compare everything else against the anchor. Where you set the anchor changes your chart completely. | Continue reading
Rewind to 2006 when Hans Rosling’s talk using moving bubbles was at peak attention. Researchers studied whether animation in visualization was a good thing. Danyel Fisher revisits their resea… | Continue reading
Working from the Quick, Draw! dataset, Moniker dares people to not draw a penis: In 2018 Google open-sourced the Quickdraw data set. “The world’s largest doodling data set”. The set consists … | Continue reading
The American Time Use Survey recently released results for 2018. That makes 15 years of data. What’s different? What’s the same? | Continue reading
Nicholas Rougeux, who has a knack and the patience to recreate vintage works in a modern context, reproduced Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants: If someone told me wh… | Continue reading
A few years ago, The New York Times asked readers to guess a trend line before showing the actual data. It forced readers to test their own beliefs against reality. TheyDrawIt from the MU Collectiv… | Continue reading
Some people love the Tidyverse in R. Others are less fond of it. For me, the more tools the better. | Continue reading
When it comes to reading lists, we usually look for what’s popular, because if a lot of people read something, then there must be something good about it. Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas … | Continue reading
As industries change and interests shift, some bachelor’s degrees grow more popular while others become less so. | Continue reading
National Geographic went all out on their atlas of moons. Space. Orbits. Rotating and interactive objects in the sky. Ooo. You’ll want to bookmark this one for later, so you can spend time wi… | Continue reading
As you might expect, NASA collects a lot of data, and much of it is seasonal. Eleanor Lutz animated a few maps to show the detail: To show a few examples, the NASA Earth Observations website includ… | Continue reading
The citizenship question for the upcoming Census is still stuck in limbo. One of the arguments against the question is that it could lead to a significant undercount in population, which can lead t… | Continue reading
Roger Peng provides a lesson on the roots of R and how it got to where it is now: Chambers was referring to the difficulty in naming and characterizing the S system. Is it a programming language? A… | Continue reading
It’s about purpose. It’s about who your work is for. It’s about what you’re trying to show. | Continue reading
Alfred Ng for CNET: Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as w… | Continue reading
Mark Rober, who is great at explaining and demonstrating math and engineering to a wide audience, gets into the gist of machine learning in his latest video: | Continue reading
The day-to-day changes a lot when you have kids. However, it seems to change more for women than it does for men. | Continue reading
I have a feeling we’re in for a lot of manipulated videos as we get closer to the election. The Washington Post provides a guide for the different types. I hope they keep building on this wit… | Continue reading
Here is the good stuff for June 2019. | Continue reading
In some public places, such as schools and hospitals, microphones installed with software listen for noise that sounds like aggression. The systems alert the authorities. It sounds useful, but in p… | Continue reading
In the biggest crossover event of the century, Tom Lum used the Wikipedia API to chart the number of views for every reference in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. Yes. [via @waxpa… | Continue reading
Sonja Kuijpers used abstract imagery to represent some sobering numbers: You might be wondering what you are viewing here. This landscape, each element in it represents a person who committed suici… | Continue reading
For The New York Times, Kevin Roose on the possibility of machines becoming your boss: The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace, A.I. sees humanity itsel… | Continue reading
Ben Fry using the “tropiest of design tropes”, describes his goals for visualization. On communication: Communication is the most basic part: the table stakes of information design. If … | Continue reading
You know those sped up videos where there’s a long line for something and someone walks the length of it? The New York Times did the scrolly equivalent for the recent Hong Kong protest, using… | Continue reading
After you’ve made your carefully designed data graphics, you probably want to share them online at some point. This is how I do it. | Continue reading
A small discrepancy in a couple of shapefiles led to a misclassification of land. Wealthy investors are taking advantage. For ProPublica, Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott: They have President Do… | Continue reading
The single-family home. It’s part of the American dream, but it can be awfully expensive when land grows scarce. Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui for The Upshot map and discuss the current appr… | Continue reading
Learn how to build a custom visualization using D3.js and get acquainted with the popular JavaScript library. | Continue reading
Researchers went around rural Pennsylvania, showing people the charts above and asking what they thought about them. Evan Peck with one of the main findings from the study: As we analyzed and coded… | Continue reading