DataKind receives $20M grant to expand on data for social good

DataKind, the organization known for helping others use data for social good, received a $20 million grant from The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: The grant … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Looking for common misspellings

Some words are harder to spell than others, and on the internet, sometimes people indicate the difficulty by following their uncertainty with “(sp?)”. Colin Morris collected all the wor… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Real-time speed of light from Earth to Mars

Hurry up, light. We’re gonna be late: By James O’Donoghue, the animation shows the speed of light in real-time. The distance between Earth, the moon, and Mars is to scale, but the locat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Personality quiz with traits on a spectrum

Ah, the online personality quiz, oh how I missed you. Oh wait, this one is slightly different. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker and Julia Wolfe provide a quiz used by psychologists to gauge… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Datawrapper Review: A Focused Charting Tool That Requires No Code

Datawrapper is an online tool that helps you make nice-looking charts for the web. No code is required. Instead, a focused interface lets you load data, pick your chart type, refine, and publish. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Inside out map of the Grand Canyon

John Nelson turned the Grand Canyon inside out to understand the magnitude better: Some of my earliest memories of the place had to do with the trippy feeling of my eyes and mind trying to make sen… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Build a parasite to block your digital assistant

Digital assistants offer convenience, but they also offer continuous surveillance, and it’s not always clear when the tech is listening. Alias by Bjørn Karmann is a device you put on top of t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Amanda Cox promoted to New York Times data editor

Amanda Cox is the new data editor for The New York Times: As data editor, Amanda will continue to provide direction for The Upshot, and she’ll add the expertise from Computer-Assisted Reporting jou… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Goodbye, Mid-Range Shot

There’s a space on the basketball court called “mid-range.” It’s actually not off-limits. In fact, people used to shoot these so-called “mid-range” shots. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ How to Make Animated (GIF) Heatmaps in R

Using color as the visual encoding, show changes over time in two dimensions. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

When geolocation makes everyone think you stole their phone

People show up unannounced at John and his mother Ann’s home in South Africa, looking for stolen property, but John and Ann didn’t steal anything. For Gizmodo, Kashmir Hill investigates… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

One-year time-lapse of the weather

Along the same lines as last week’s one-year wind time-lapse, Weather Decoded provides this one-year time-lapse of the weather over the United States: Fun. [via kottke] | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Voronoi diagram from smooshing paint between glass

It feels like magic. I think there’s a magic trick percolating in there somewhere. I’m not sure where this is from. It looks like it’s a recording from a camera pointed at a telev… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Repetitions, Data Analysis as Brainstorm

Compelling visualization don’t just conjure itself out of nowhere. The ideas come from somewhere, and oftentimes they build off previous ones. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Time-lapse of all the wind in 2018

Using the same National Weather Service data that powers his live-ish wind map of Earth, Cameron Beccario put together a time-lapse for all of 2018. Watch it on full-screen in its 4k glory. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Government shutdown, other industries provided for scale

As the shutdown continues, 800,000 government workers wait for something to happen. The New York Times uses others industries for scale. Ugh. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Vintage map with modern 3-D elevation

This vintage recreation by graphic designer Scott Reinhard fills all the right checkboxes for me. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Border wall progress chart

Denise Lu for The New York Times provides a quick overview of the proposed border wall and its progress. Scroll for zeros. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

List of visualization best-of-year lists, 2018

The end of a year is always a good time to look back at past work, because the day-to-day can sometimes feel like an endless churn. There’s also just no way to remember everything, and becaus… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

No such thing as raw data

Nick Barrowman on the myth of raw data: Assumptions inevitably find their way into the data and color the conclusions drawn from it. Moreover, they reflect the beliefs of those who collect the data… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Avoiding D3, Using D3, and Why I Use D3

D3.js can be used for a lot of things, and for some people it’s too much to deal with. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Applying for a PhD program in visualization

Niklas Elmqvist provides a detailed guide for finding and a visualization PhD program: Unless you have a specific reason to choose a specific university (such as a geographic one; maybe you can’t r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Context to the stock market rise and falls

The stock market is in a state. So finicky the past few months. Kate Rabinowitz and Leslie Shapiro for The Washington Post provide a view further into the past for more context to the recent flux. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Fake internet

Max Read for New York Magazine describes the fake-ness of internet through the metrics, the people, and the content: Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How to Read and Use a Box-And-Whisker Plot

Believe it or not, the box-and-whisker is not just a box and some whiskers. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

2018.

While looking through this year’s projects, picking out my favorites, I couldn’t help but reminisce about the times when the internet used to feel so care-free. It was more relaxed. The… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Higher turnout for midterm elections

Bloomberg charted voter turnout for the just past midterm elections, comparing 2018 against 2014. As you might expect, there are a lot of blue arrows pointed up and to the left. Turnout decreased i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2018

Visualization continues to mature and develop into a medium. There’s less focus on visualization the tool and more focus on how to use the tools. That is a good thing. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Kernel density estimation explainer

Matthew Conlen provides a short explainer of how kernel density estimation works. Nifty. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Top NBA player by zone

Kirk Goldsberry is back at ESPN. I put this here mainly because it’s nice to have the hexbin shot charts in the feed again. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Following your gut, following the data

The Wall Street Journal highlighted a disagreement between data and business at Netflix. Ultimately, the business side “won.” However, maybe that’s the wrong framing. Roger Peng d… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Finding all of the trees in the world with machine learning

Descartes Labs used machine learning to identify all of the trees in the world where at least one-meter resolution satellite imagery is available. Tim Wallace with the maps: The ability to map tree… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Old Christmas songs get all the play time

Jon Keegan scraped the playlist from the local radio station’s all-Christmas playlist for a few days. Then he looked at play counts and and original composition dates: Considering the year in… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Tufte Tweet Follow-up; Visualization Tools and Resources Roundup for December 2018

Edward Tufte criticized R for not being able to some things typographically. It came in a tweet and was likely misunderstood. I got a clarification from the man himself. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Spotting AI-generated faces

Computers can generate faces that look real. What a time to be alive. As it becomes easier to do so, you can bet that the software will be used at some point for less innocent reasons. You should p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Make a figure-ground diagram using OpenStreetMap data

In visual perception, a figure-ground grouping is where you recognize an object through the background. Think of the vase and two faces image. Hans Hack made a simple tool that lets you make such a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Modern reproduction of 1847 geometry books

Euclid’s Elements is a series of 13 books produced in 300 BC that forms a collection of mathematician Euclid’s proofs and definitions. In 1847, Oliver Byrne recreated the first six book… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Soup-Salad-Sandwich space

The debate rages on about the categorization of food items as soup, salad, or sandwich. Is a hot dog a sandwich? It has meat in bread. At what ratio of solid to liquid does a stew become a soup? Th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Ages in Congress, from the 1st to the 115th

As I watched Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai field questions from the House Judiciary Committee it was hard not to feel like there was a big gap in how the internet works and how members of Congre… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Google Fusion Tables Shutdown, Lack of Preservation, and Finding Alternatives

Google announced that Fusion Tables will be laid to rest, which highlights a need for preservation of visualization for the long-term. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Apps gather your location and then sell the data

The New York Times takes a closer look at the data that apps collect and what they know about you: At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable locati… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Single-Income Occupations

Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

When cycling is faster than driving

Deliveroo is a service that picks up and delivers food. Data from their delivery riders showed that it was faster to ride a bike than other modes of transportation in cities. Carlton Reid for Forbe… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Falling ticket prices for longer flights

Based on data from Expedia, this is an interesting one from The Economist. Using polar coordinates, they used angle to represent percentage change in ticket prices and the radius to represent the d… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Cohort and age effects

I’m just gonna put this xkcd comic right here. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Population mountains

You’ve seen the maps of population density. You’ve seen the jokes. But you haven’t seen population at high granularity in a 3-D view. Matt Daniels for The Pudding used a mountain … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Reduced privacy risk in exchange for accuracy in the Census count

Mark Hansen for The Upshot describes the search for balance between individual privacy and an accurate 2020 Census count. It turns out to not be that difficult to reconstruct person-level data from… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Visualization the Medium, the Amorphous Blobby

A couple of famous directors were defending animated films as a medium rather than a genre of film meant for kids. I got to thinking about the parallels to visualization. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago