The map sold for $239,000 at a Christie’s auction, but it was misdated and is a couple of centuries older than previously thought: It’s the fourth oldest surviving portolan chart of Europe, t… | Continue reading
In the land of what-if and what-about, it's surprisingly easy to get stuck staring at your work, thinking about how your audience will hate it. You have to let it go.Tags: audience, focus, purpose | Continue reading
muted.io is a set of visual tools to help you learn music theory. Learn about notes, chords, and scales through a playful and colorful interface. | Continue reading
Google Fonts now provides two open source fonts by Dmitry Ivanov that let you make simplified, small to medium line and bar charts based on data: Linefont and Wavefont. These might come in handy wh… | Continue reading
The Washington Post looked at the many satellites orbiting our planet. A globe shows a dot for each satellite, which are mostly there to show that there are a lot. I always appreciate dot transitio… | Continue reading
These are income ranges for the ten most common jobs at different income levels.Tags: income, work | Continue reading
Using a combination of weather reports, videos, and 911 calls, The New York Times uses mixed media to show the events leading up to the wildfire in Lahaina, Maui. Firefighters had rescued dozens of… | Continue reading
For The Washington Post, Nitasha Tiku, Kevin Schaul and Szu Yu Chen demonstrate how AI generators lead to biased images. The systems use data slurped up from the internet to guess what pixels to sh… | Continue reading
Maybe you've run into the rare situation/blessing of too much space, and you're not sure how to fill it. There are options.Tags: options, space | Continue reading
Denise Lu, a superfan of Pavement, an indie rock band, examined the set lists from years past. I didn’t know anything about the band going in but came out with an appreciation of their art an… | Continue reading
As Disney and its stock price struggles with streaming, Reuters looks at how Disney overcame previous challenges in its 100-year history. One of the first challenges was making animation that was b… | Continue reading
When you score a reservation at a busy restaurant, it can feel like you just won a modest lottery. However, getting a reservation is not just randomness. You’re up against others vying for th… | Continue reading
Bloomberg estimates that Taylor Swift reached billionaire status with her recent touring and music releases. Swift achieved the milestone mostly with music. Bloomberg provides the visual splits wit… | Continue reading
Insects are dying at a high rate every year, but it is difficult to estimate an accurate number, because it is a challenge to gather data for millions of species around the world. In a new-to-me se… | Continue reading
Here is the good stuff for October 2023.Tags: roundup | Continue reading
With the most recent release from the Survey of Consumer Finances, see how your household's net worth compares against others'.Tags: income | Continue reading
There are food shortages in Guatemala. For Reuters, Cassandra Garrison, Clare Trainor and Sarah Slobin used a height chart to show stunted growth as an indicator. A few tortillas and a half bowl of… | Continue reading
Data for the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, from the Federal Reserve Board, was made available recently. It comes out every three years, so you can see how income and savings have changed over t… | Continue reading
Mike Breen is a well-known NBA basketball announcer. When a player hits a big three-pointer, Breen often uses his catchphrase, “Bang!” Someone counted all the times he yelled the phrase… | Continue reading
When I was a kid, I remember uncomfortably walking past the book section at a grocery store where I would see a bunch of books of a muscular man, probably Fabio, clutching on to a woman as he looke… | Continue reading
The Google Maps API lets you access high-resolution 3D map tiles now. Robert Hodgin has been experimenting with the new data source using Houdini, which is 3D graphics software that might as well b… | Continue reading
For The New York Times, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina show the changing checkboxes over the past couple centuries: Over the centuries, the census has evolved from one that specified broad ca… | Continue reading
Every now and then, the work can feel like a slog, but that usually means I've lost sight of the point.Tags: purpose | Continue reading
One of the most straightforward ways to help others better understand the scale of an unfamiliar place is to compare it to familiar places. For The Washington Post, Dylan Moriarty and Bonnie Berkow… | Continue reading
Julia Janicki, Daisy Chung, and Joyce Chou explore Taiwan’s aging population, where in 2021, pets outnumbered children. I like the experimental views in this piece. More of this please. | Continue reading
This is how the most common causes have changed over time for people aged 0 to 85.Tags: mortality | Continue reading
Peter Atwood used NASA data to depict the wildfires in Canada this year. The realistic rendering of the fires as burning embers and smoke activity is something. | Continue reading
Solar power is clean and all, but what happens when the sun is blocked by the moon and there’s suddenly no sunlight for a fixed period of time? For Bloomberg, Naureen Malik, with graphics by … | Continue reading
The moon is going to get in the way of the sun this Saturday. For The New York Times, Jonathan Corum has the map of when and how much sun coverage we’ll see in the western hemisphere. | Continue reading
Whether a difference seems big or small, important or not, depends on the scale you choose.Tags: scale | Continue reading
Cloud formation depends on temperature and moisture levels, so in places of high humidity like the East Coast and Pacific Northwest, the clouds form lower. In dryer places like the southwestern Uni… | Continue reading
There are existing functions and packages to make heatmaps in R, but when the data is irregular, it's worth going custom.Tags: R | Continue reading
Star Trek and related might be fictional, but they usually reference real stars, planets, and galaxies. Overview Effect mapped, charted, and spreadsheeted the possible real-life locations in space … | Continue reading
Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A big part of her studies are rooted in the collection and analysis of centuries-old data: Women are vastly underrepre… | Continue reading
The New York Times is mapping rocket strikes, attacks, and ongoing conflict in…Tags: Gaza, missile, New York Times | Continue reading
Ben Welsh has a running list of the news organizations blocking OpenAI crawlers: In total, 532 of 1,147 news publishers surveyed by the homepages.news archive have instructed OpenAI, Google AI or t… | Continue reading
There is going to be a solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. The moon will only partially block out the sun in most areas (if at all), but for a select few in the right path, it’ll go all dark for … | Continue reading
Look at individual data points separately and get more out of the small pictures.Tags: disaggregation | Continue reading
The Washington Post goes with a tree ring metaphor to compare life expectancy in your state. Enter your sex, age, and state. The inner white circles represent how old you are, the middle yellow cir… | Continue reading
Here are the major sports drawn at the same scale to help appreciate the differences between field and court sizes.Tags: scale, sports | Continue reading
For Bloomberg, Rachael Dottle and Leslie Kaufman go with the combo stacked area chart and stacked bar chart on the top and bottom to show increased cost of billion dollar disasters and the counts o… | Continue reading
For the Apple Women’s Health Study, which uses cycle tracking data from iPhones and Apple Watches, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health provides a visual explanation of how menstrual… | Continue reading
As we get older, our life expectancy declines. Such is life. But when and how quickly the decline happens and how it happens has changed over the years.Tags: mortality | Continue reading
Every month I collect tools and resources to help you make better charts. Here's the good stuff for September.Tags: roundup | Continue reading
The David Rumsey Map Collection has been home to tens of thousands of historical maps, and now you can search the collection by the text in the maps instead of just through metadata: About 57,000 o… | Continue reading
For The Pudding, Alvin Chang examines loneliness through the lens of individual responses from the American Time Use Survey: In this story, we’ll go through 24 hours of a typical weekend day … | Continue reading
When you compare two areas on a single map, it can be a challenge to compare the actual size of them because of the trade-offs with projecting a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional space… | Continue reading
Beer dates back thousands of centuries, but it was not the beer we know today. It might have been more… chewy? More like gruel? Sounds amazing. With a fun illustrated piece, The Washington Po… | Continue reading