Rock map of Scotland

Harry Jefferies shared his grandfather’s 30-year project: My grandpa who is 85 started making this rock map of Scotland in 1992. He collected rocks during amateur geology trips over 30 years.… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 8 months ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, February 2024 Roundup

Every month I collect tools and resources that help you make better charts. Here's the good stuff for February.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 8 months ago

Algorithmic road trip to visit a street named after each day of the year

Ben Ashforth set out to visit a street named after a day of the year for each date. He used OpenStreetMap to find the streets and then algorithmically routed a trip. Then he followed through and we… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 8 months ago

McDonald’s Locations vs. Golf Courses

There are thousands of McDonald's locations, but there are still more golf courses in the United States. This seems surprising, but some maps make it clear.Tags: golf, McDonald's | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Interactive LED basketball court

During the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend, the basketball court was essentially a giant LED screen on the second day. The company behind the panels talked about the technical side for a WTHR news segmen… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Map of most common domesticated animals

Based on data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, this map by John Johnson shows the predominant domesticated animal in each county in the United States. It nonchalantly includes humans. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Feeling Rested with Age

How much you sleep each night matters, but more importantly, it's about the quality and if you feel rested when you wake up.Tags: age, rest, sleep, well-being | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

✚ Looking for a Denominator

To decide if values are high or low, sometimes you have to divide the numbers for a relative comparison instead of an absolute one.Tags: comparison, denominator | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Love: math or magic?

This American Life tells the tales as old as time: When it comes to finding love, there seems to be two schools of thought on the best way to go about it. One says, wait for that lightning-strike m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Data-driven running journal

K.K. Rebecca Lai ran her first marathon. She recounts her training and the day of the event with a series of maps and charts. It reads like a data-driven journal entry, which I am always up for. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Rise of Caitlin Clark, scoring machine

Caitlin Clark, a basketball guard for the University of Iowa, has been steadily adding to her point total over the past four years. Clark broke the NCAA record this past week. But as we all know, i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Race and Occupation

Asian workers are more than three times more likely to be physicians. What other jobs jump out? What's it like for other races and ethnicity?Tags: race, work | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

✚ Better or Less Bad

People like to judge charts by pointing out all the things that are wrong, which is limiting in practice.Tags: criticism | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

BrailleR, a R package to improve access for blind users

From CRAN: Blind users do not have access to the graphical output from R without printing the content of graphics windows to an embosser of some kind. This is not as immediate as is required for ef… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Diva-ness of national anthem renditions

You’ve probably heard various renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner, and sometimes singers put a little extra something in the anthem. A bit of flourish. Some attitude. For The Pudding, Jan … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Consumer confidence in current economic conditions

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conferen… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

When and How Many Super Bowl Wins, by Team

How does the modern Kansas City Chiefs compare to teams who won previous Super Bowls over the past 58 years?Tags: football, Super Bowl | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Your body as a processing plant, digesting a hot wing

Your body goes through a special process to digest spicy food. The sting, the sweating, the sting afterwards. For the Washington Post, Bonnie Berkowitz, Aaron Steckelberg, and Szu Yu Chen illustrat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Investor expectations for interest rates compared to reality

This chart by Eric Wallerstein for the Wall Street Journal shows expectations against reality. They often don’t match up. See also: how rate projections change over time. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

✚ Organizing Data

This week's topic comes through a FD reader who asks how I manage and organize data from analysis through visualization.Tags: organization | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Highest Education Level by Age

Education paths start to diverge towards the end of high school and after.Tags: age, education | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Speed puzzling times and strategies

There are competitions where people complete jigsaw puzzles as quickly as they can, and some teams take it very seriously. Because of course. For the Washington Post, Chris Alcantara shows the time… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Evolution of the scrollbar

Sébastien Matos used a straightforward view to show the evolution of the scrollbar, dating back to the Xerox 8010 Information System from 1981. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Researchers might have found Amelia Earhart’s crashed plane

For NPR, Juliana Kim reports: Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in South Carolina, announced Saturday that it captured compelling sonar images of what could be Earhart’s air… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Decline of the school bus

For WP’s Department of Data, Andrew Van Dam notes the decline of the school bus and the rise of the private vehicle to bring kids to school. The estimates are based on responses to the Nation… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Infinite Craft with large language model

Start with water, fire, wind, and earth and see what you can craft by combining elements. Neal Agarwal made a game, Infinite Craft, that uses Llama 2, a large language model, to build just about an… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

✚ Long Information

There was a time when big infographics ruled, and then their popularity faded as quickly as it came. It wasn't because of their size though, which might have been the only thing right about them.Tags: analysis, depth, size | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

A New FlowingData Book, Second Edition

I wrote a book! It’s the second edition of Visualize This. It focuses on the how of visualization with practical examples that you can apply to your own data. You’ll learn how to use a … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Local wanderlust

Alastair Humphreys, using a 20 by 20 kilometer map of where he lives, explored one square kilometer at a time as if he were traveling farther. For the Guardian: Travelling around my unremarkable ma… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Commonness of Race in Different Occupations

Some occupations are more race-dominant than others. This is the percentage of employed persons 16 years and older who are a given race or ethnicity for each.Tags: race, work | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

World railway map

Usually when you see a railway map, it’s from a local perspective, because it’s meant to show how you get from point A to point B. As a learning experiment, Zhaoxu Sui mapped major rail… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 9 months ago

Cost of a Big Mac at every McDonald’s in the United States

A map, by Pantry & Larder, shows the cost of a Big Mac at each McDonald’s in the United States, as of early 2023. As you might expect, the prices are higher on the east and west coasts. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Shifting bird populations

Using data from the crowdsourced database eBird, Harry Stevens mapped the shifts in bird populations for the Washington Post. Increased building and climate change have led to population declines f… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, January 2024 Roundup

Here's the good stuff for January.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Mathematical feature in all Sudoku puzzles

For Numberphile, Simon Anthony explains the Phistomephel Ring. The shape always contains the same numbers as the corners do. Math magic! | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Catalog of AI data tools

Meant to be comprehensive more than a curated collection, the Journalist’s Toolbox AI provides many links to tools that might help you data more efficiently. Or at least use more AI-ish thing… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Where else to find FlowingData

You can always count on the site for updates on visualization, data, and statistics. There’s also RSS and email. But someone told me you should meet the people where they are, so here are the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

DNA face to facial recognition in attempt to find suspect

In an effort to find a suspect in a 1990 murder, there was a police request in 2017 to use a 3-D rendering of a face based on DNA. For Wired, Dhruv Mehrotra reports: The detective’s request to run … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Oceans that all the rivers drain

Rivers drain into oceans. Grasshopper Geography color-coded the rivers in the world by the ocean they drain into and made a series of maps. But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of y… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Collection of NBA basketball data sources and apps

If you’re into basketball data, Sravan Pannala is keeping a running list of data sources, apps, and visualization on the topic. I can always use more basketball data, so I’ll bookmark t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Learning animal languages with AI

Financial Times highlights how researchers are using AI to try to learn what animal sounds mean and to communicate back. Turn on the sound for maximum effect. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

✚ Visual Metaphor

Welcome to The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau. Statistical charts are often abstract representations of data whit… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Where restaurants serve Asian food in the U.S.

You can find Asian restaurants in most places in the United States, but the type of Asian food choices varies. For Pew Research, Sona Shah and Regina Widjaya mapped the distributions of eight major… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Where it warmed the most in the world

Earth got its hottest year on record in 2023. Based on data from Berkeley Earth, John Muyskens and Niko Kommenda, for The Washington Post, focused on the geographic areas that experienced the bigge… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Snow drought

A warming climate has meant less snow in the northern hemisphere, which is a problem when agriculture depends on melting snow to grow crops. Bloomberg reports on the current snow drought situation. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Find familiar places in new cities

If you’re traveling to a new city, it can be tricky to figure out where things are and what the places are like. However, if you had a tool that set the context of the new city in terms of th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

When movies become musicals and then movies again

For The Washington Post, Hanna Zakharenko charted all the movies that were adapted from musicals that were adapted from movies. So the above shows the timelines for original movies. Then the musica… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

✚ Unlimited Chart Options

We often talk about visualization in terms of restrictions and rules, as if you must limit your possibilities to make charts the right way. As you might have guessed, there are other options.Tags: options | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago