You’ve probably seen the maps of Earth at night. It gives you a good idea of activity around the world, through the eyes of light. As an experiment and a shift in view, Jacob Wasilkowski mapp… | Continue reading
Graham Douglas, a data journalist at The Economist, looks back on the days when getting data and visualizing it was tedious from start to finish: But even these seemingly simple charts had their ch… | Continue reading
In a collaboration with Siena College, The Upshot is showing live polling results. The ticker moves in real-time for every phone call. For the first time, we’ll publish our poll results and display… | Continue reading
Visualization as template-filling content is lazy visualization that no one draws benefit from. Give people a reason to care. | Continue reading
Datasets are scattered across the web, tucked into cobwebbed corners where nobody can find them. Google Dataset Search aims to make the process easier: Similar to how Google Scholar works, Dataset … | Continue reading
Sports visualization and analysis tends to focus on gameplay — where the players are, where the ball goes, etc. In Reimagine the Game, the focus in on crowd noise through the course of a game… | Continue reading
It’s getting hotter around the world. The New York Times zooms in on your hometown to show the average number of “very hot days” (at least 90 degrees) since you were born and then… | Continue reading
Post-game sports interviews tend to sound similar. And when you do say something out of pattern, the talk shows and the social media examine every word to find hidden meaning. It’s no wonder … | Continue reading
When the web was relatively new, things were more of a free-for-all. Everything was an experiment, and it always felt like there were fewer consequences online, because not that many people really … | Continue reading
Defaults are generalizations to fit many datasets, which means you usually get barebone charts. For analysis, all well and good. However, data graphics for presentation require more care after the … | Continue reading
Nicky Case ponders the “valuable-ness” of the things he makes as the product of the number of people reached and the average value for each person reached. Finding the balance is tricky… | Continue reading
Tom White is an artist who uses neural networks to draw abstract pictures of objects. What looks blobby and fuzzy to us looks more concrete to the machine. James Vincent for The Verge: That “… | Continue reading
Defaults are generalized settings to work with many datasets. This is fine for analysis, but data graphics for presentation benefit from context-specific design. | Continue reading
Pinball feels like a game of chance that is uncontrollable from any angle. In typical Vox fashion, the video explains the game and its predictability. | Continue reading
Picular is a simple tool that lets you search for a topic, and with Google Images as source, outputs a set of colors related to your query. This is going to be a great timesaver. | Continue reading
A research study on mortality and alcohol consumption is making the rounds. Its main conclusion is that all alcohol consumption is bad for you, because of increased risk. David Spiegelhalter, the c… | Continue reading
Using a mathematical model based on satellite data, NASA shows an estimate of aerosol in the atmosphere on August 23, 2018: The visualization above highlights GEOS FP model output for aerosols on A… | Continue reading
After seeing a 1950s physical visualization, I wondered if I could follow a similar process using modern techniques. | Continue reading
Don’t use this chart type. That’s misleading. Make sure to only use this color scheme. That takes too long to interpret. Use this scale to show that thing. Sometimes it seems like there… | Continue reading
Lucy Engelman has synesthesia, which is a perceptual response where one sensory pathway is stimulated, and a secondary sense is triggered. Daniel Mullen, in collaboration with Engelman, paints what… | Continue reading
Peter Beshai was tasked with visualizing the toxicity in Twitter conversations. He arrived at this organic-looking model using 3-D visual effects software. Nice. | Continue reading
Statistics. I kid, I kid. Hugo Bowne-Anderson, host of the DataFramed podcast, culled some information together that he’s gathered from interviewing data scientists. This is what data scienti… | Continue reading
A fun experiment by Neil Charles that used the aesthetics of wind maps to represent World Cup 2018 play activity: It looks like the familiar shape of an average football game, with the bulk of the … | Continue reading
Ever since the huge forecasting upset in 2016, I’ve tended to stay away from that stuff. I mean, it was painful to watch the Golden State Warriors, a huge favorite to win the championship bas… | Continue reading
Frustrated with the size of pockets on women’s pants, Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas for The Pudding, measured pocket sizes in 20 popular jean brands. They compared men’s and women’s … | Continue reading
Made-by-hand visualization has been making a mini comeback as of late, and it’s been fun to see what people do with data away from the computer.Of course, we don’t have the time to draw every c… | Continue reading
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News delves into the increasing number of wildfires in California: Most of California’s rain and snow falls in between October and March, which means that fire season pea… | Continue reading
The Mendocino Complex Fire, now the largest in California ever, continues to burn. I live a couple of hundred miles away, but the sky is yellow and orange at times, and it was smokey a few days ago… | Continue reading
Map-making is a tricky business with many variables to consider that can directly change how someone interprets the land and people in a location. The Cartography Playground is a simple site to tes… | Continue reading
A gray piece of paper moves along a gradient. You won’t believe your eyes. A demo of lightness perception pic.twitter.com/BSVpgcuIw1— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) August 12, 2018 | Continue reading
The Padma River in Bangladesh is constantly shifting its 75-mile path. Joshua Stevens for the NASA Earth Observatory shows what the shifting looked like through satellite imagery, over a 30-year sp… | Continue reading
The camera on the slightly creepy arm takes a picture of the pages in the book, the software uses OpenCV to extract faces, and the faces are passed to Google Auto ML Vision comparing the faces to a… | Continue reading
Wherever more attention or the appearance of it equates to more money, there are those who try to game the system. Michael H. Keller for The New York Times examines the business of fake YouTube vie… | Continue reading
Sometimes the visualization takes care of itself. Photographer Tim Whittaker filmed sheepdogs herding thousands of sheep, and the flows one place to another are like organized randomness. | Continue reading
Popular summer songs have had a bubbly, generic feel to them the past several years, but it wasn’t always like that. Styles used to be more diverse, and things might be headed back in that di… | Continue reading
The New York Times published an election map. A lot of people did not like the map, arguing that it was an inaccurate representation. Those who did like the map argued that one must consider intent… | Continue reading
We usually visualize data on computers, because it’s where the data exists and it’s a more efficient process. But as long as you can make shapes and use colors, you can use just about a… | Continue reading
There are many mistakes you can make when you first get into visualization. Yan Holtz and Conor Healy catalog the common pitfalls as part of their project From Data to Viz. While there are a lot, k… | Continue reading
From xkcd, a blockbuster idea right here. | Continue reading
Levees are intended to prevent flooding in the areas they are built, but they change the direction and speed of flowing water, which can cause unintended flooding in areas upstream. ProPublica and … | Continue reading
Genetic algorithms are inspired by natural selection, where the system is given a set of inputs and the “best” iteration is chosen until there’s some kind of convergence to a solu… | Continue reading
Apple’s value passed $1 trillion on Thursday, and as tradition requires, we must consider the scale of such a large number. We must compare the value of Apple against the sum value of a surpr… | Continue reading
NPR used video from a thermographic camera to explain why cities tend to be hotter than their surrounding areas. Straightforward and a good complement to the video. | Continue reading
Welcome to the new members-only newsletter: The Process. In this first update, a certain data graphics expert seems to really dislike R, which prompts a look into the visualization tools we use and… | Continue reading
I’m happy to introduce an in-depth, process-focused newsletter for FlowingData members. It’s called The Process. If you’re already a member, you should receive the first issue soo… | Continue reading
As the field grows and needs develop throughout companies, specialization in data science is a natural next step. Elena Grewal, head of data science at Airbnb, describes their three main tracks and… | Continue reading
Oliver Roeder for FiveThirtyEight: FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical reco… | Continue reading
Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby for Bloomberg visualized land use for the conterminous United States using a pixel-like grid map: The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzz… | Continue reading