Context makes data useful. Without it, it’s easy to get lost in numbers that mean little, but finding the context of data isn’t especially straightforward. Catherine D’Ignazio exp… | Continue reading
The Economist charted the divisions within political parties using Brexit votes as proxy. I’m here for the bubbles. | Continue reading
There is a lot of Census data. You can grab most of the recent aggregates through the American FactFinder or via FTP or some obscure Census page that hasn’t been updated in a decade. It’… | Continue reading
Using estimates from a study on regional bias in tax audits, ProPublica mapped the likelihood of getting audited by the IRS. They then turn their attention to Humphreys County, Mississippi: In a ba… | Continue reading
Matt Hong used a stacked bar chart over time as the frame for a data comic about American time use. Each row represents a 2-hour window during the day, and each stack represents the percentage of A… | Continue reading
Everyone’s story is a little different. Alyssa Fowers tracked her long-distance relationship in the context of the temperature between two locations and the travel to and from. | Continue reading
Speaking of relationship timelines, Chris Lewis used texting history with his girlfriend after the first swipe on Bumble as the backdrop of their own story. A few 21k messages later, they’re … | Continue reading
Sarah Leo, a visual journalist at The Economist, looked through the archives and found some charts that could use a re-design. After a deep dive into our archive, I found several instructive exampl… | Continue reading
Every month I collect practical resources, new tools, code, and datasets. Here’s the good stuff for March. | Continue reading
Sometimes you really do need to get away. Escape, part search engine and part research project from students at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory in Singapore, shows you the cheapest flights out of… | Continue reading
If only there were a way to keep more people more healthy. That would be nice. | Continue reading
Visualize rankings over time instead of absolute values to focus on order instead of the magnitude of change. | Continue reading
Everyone’s relationship timeline is a little different. This animation plays out real-life paths to marriage. | Continue reading
The Stanford Open Policing Project just released a dataset for police traffic stops across the country: Currently, a comprehensive, national repository detailing interactions between police and the… | Continue reading
There’s less than a month until taxes are due. It’s the most wonderful time of year, isn’t it? As you probably know, there are some changes in deductions, limits, and refund amoun… | Continue reading
There’s a new hotness in chart town. It’s a bar chart. But it moves to show rankings over time. | Continue reading
Other than calls from my wife, I can’t even remember the last call I received that wasn’t a robocall. Based on data from the Robocall Index and the American Community Survey, Sara Fisch… | Continue reading
For FiveThirtyEight, William T. Adler and Ella Koeze describe how a metric called partisan bias is used to assess partisan gerrymandering. As you might imagine, it’s fuzzy. | Continue reading
We know that people are marrying later in life, but that’s not the only shift. The whole relationship timeline is stretching. | Continue reading
Marian Eerens charted the colors of each Adventures of Tintin book cover. The only thing missing is the actual covers on the mouseover. It’s a straightforward thing, but I find these sort of … | Continue reading
Compared to a computer’s pseudo-random number generator, we are not good at picking random numbers. Ilya Perederiy made a quick game to show how bad you are: Your fingers tend to repeat certa… | Continue reading
How do couples meet now and how has it changed over the years? Watch the rankings play out over six decades. | Continue reading
Trey Harris, a previous tech administrator for a university, tells the story of a statistics department that couldn’t send email farther than 500 miles away. The story is more about the pecul… | Continue reading
John Tukey wrote, “The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” Not everyone wants to see though. | Continue reading
FastCharts is the public version of the Financial Times’ in-house solution for making charts, uh, fast. Load some data. Get the chart fast. FastCharts. Kachow. | Continue reading
“So how’d you two meet?” There’s always a story, but the general ways people meet are usually similar. Here are the most common. | Continue reading
To connect servers around the world, there are actual cables that run under the ocean. The New York Times mapped current and future cables, with a focus on the ones owned by Amazon, Facebook, Googl… | Continue reading
TwoTone, by Datavized and supported by the Google News Initiative, is a straightforward tool to sonify a dataset. Upload your data, select the metric, speed, and instrument, and you get a tune outp… | Continue reading
I’m thoroughly enjoying the work coming from graphic designer Scott Reinhard as of late. He combines modern techniques with vintage feels. In his most recent, he provides a “look at wha… | Continue reading
Colin Morris culled common misspellings on Reddit and made the data available on GitHub. For The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg and Matt Daniels took it a step further so that you too can see how bad … | Continue reading
Throughout the month I collect new tools for data and visualization and additional resources on designing data graphics. Here’s the new stuff for February. | Continue reading
Here’s a fun spin on the name analysis genre by Mary Zam. She compared the distribution of names used in movies against names used in real life: Thousands of babies are called Sophia or Abiga… | Continue reading
For when you want to show the occurrence of events over time. | Continue reading
Some jobs are common nationwide, because they are needed everywhere. Others are more specific to geography. See where job falls on the spectrum. | Continue reading
Rosenfeld, et al. from Stanford University ran a survey in 2009 for a study on How Couples Meet and Stay Together. Dan Kopf and Youyou Zhou for Quartz used this dataset to estimate the probability … | Continue reading
Speaking of 3-D usage on maps, here’s a map of bus routes in Singapore stacked one on top of the other. I’m not sure it’s especially useful to find individual routes as intended, … | Continue reading
Based on commuting data from the Census Bureau, researchers Matthew Hall, John Iceland, and Youngmin Yi tracked segregation during the day and night. Alvin Chang for Vox mapped their results: They … | Continue reading
These are the jobs in each state that are most specific to the place. | Continue reading
For SB Nation, Jon Bois takes a statistical deep dive in the search for the saddest punt in football. It’s an hour long. It’s a surprisingly fun watch. At the very least, even if you do… | Continue reading
“How do I make my data come alive? I want it to sing. I want it to dance.” Here are some ways to achieve that. | Continue reading
Leslie Roberts uses paint to encode text as colors and geometry: My paintings translate words into visual language. These panels with texts and accompanying abstract structures might be called illu… | Continue reading
There’s big money in wizarding worlds, galaxies far away, and various time-shifted universes. Let’s take a stroll through the billions of dollars earned by franchises over the years. | Continue reading
The United States is doing pretty poorly in reducing emissions. For The New York Times, Brad Plumer and Blacki Migloiozzi, show the current status and what could happen if the U.S. adopted more dra… | Continue reading
Lucas Kwan Peterson for the Los Angeles Times ranked fast food french fries. That is all. | Continue reading
After a most unforgiving dust storm on Mars, NASA ended the 14-year mission with the Opportunity rover. It was originally only planned to last 90 days. Jonathan Corum, for The New York Times, mappe… | Continue reading
Figure out the useful bits and get rid of everything else. | Continue reading
For The Upshot, Kevin Quealy continues on his path looking at the words used by Donald Trump. This time Quealy examines descriptions of the wall and who will pay for it, pre- and post-inauguration. | Continue reading
Only 15 people have done it, since you know, it’s not really easy to do. Here’s how and when they did it. | Continue reading