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
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
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
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
Google announced that Fusion Tables will be laid to rest, which highlights a need for preservation of visualization for the long-term. | Continue reading
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
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
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
I’m just gonna put this xkcd comic right here. | Continue reading
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
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
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
This interactive heatmap by Jonas Schöley shows mortality rates by age. Just use the dropdown menu to see the data for various countries. You can also compare male and female populations and countr… | Continue reading
With latitude and longitude coordinates, there are a number of ways to map geographic data using D3.js and Leaflet. | Continue reading
Multiple people can look at the same dataset and come out the other end with very different interpretations. [via @SteveStuWill] | Continue reading
Shannon Mattern for The Atlantic on how blockchain might be useful in mapping and as a replacement for GPS: Crypto-cartographers hope to use it for spatial verification—confirming that things are w… | Continue reading
RJ Andrews has a visualization design book coming out in January called Info We Trust. He hand-drew about 300 graphics for the book. One of the reasons: I decided very early that Info We Trust woul… | Continue reading
Michael Correll on the use of “visualization literacy” in research: If people (and, by some definitions, many or even most people) are chart illiterates, then we may feel tempted to wri… | Continue reading
Jonathan Schwabish gave his fourth-grade son’s class a lesson on data visualization. He wrote about his experience: I’d love to see a way to make data visualization education a broader part o… | 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 November. | Continue reading
Brian Brettschneider made a joke map randomly designating the favorite pies of certain areas. While intended as a joke and a parody of past “favorite” maps, some people took it too seri… | Continue reading
The maps that we imagine as we think about locations around the world often don’t match up with reality. Betsy Mason for National Geographic explains the discrepancy. On the misalignment of E… | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute estimated the number of years lost and the number of people affected due to particulate matter in the air. They estimated pe… | Continue reading
In the spirit of the holidays, here are the tools I am most thankful for. Without them, work would be much more tedious and painful. | Continue reading
Michelle Chandra uses street data as a base for solvable mazes: I draw each maze map by hand using the real street data of cities. In keeping with the fun nature of my art, I choose iconic city lan… | Continue reading
In news graphics, blue typically represents Democrat and red represents Republican. However, the definition isn’t so clear-cut by actual party usage. Chris Alcantara for The Washington Post b… | Continue reading
Kyle McDonald describes some of the history and current research on using algorithms to generate music. On how David Cope incorporated Markov chains to aid in his work: In 1981 David Cope began wor… | Continue reading
When you go skiing or snowboarding, you get a map of the mountain that shows the terrain and where you can go. James Niehues is the man behind many of these hand-painted ski maps around the world, … | Continue reading
Newsy, Reveal and ProPublica look into rape cases in the U.S. and law enforcement’s use of exceptional clearance. The designation allows police to clear cases when they have enough evidence t… | Continue reading
The Camp fire death toll rose to 63 and 631 missing as of yesterday. The Los Angeles Times provides some graphics showing scale and the buildings that burned. Ugh. I live a few hundred miles away a… | Continue reading
Important question: Is animation in visualization even worthwhile? Well, it depends. Surprise, surprise. In this issue, I look at animation in data visualization, its uses, and how I like to think … | Continue reading
I’m behind on my podcast listening (well, behind in everything tbh), but Reply All covered the flaws of CompStat, a data system originally employed by the NYPD to track crime and hold officer… | Continue reading
Atma Mani, a geospatial engineer for ESRI, imagined shopping for a house with data, maps, and analysis. Basically, a personalized recommendation system: The type of recommendation engine built in t… | Continue reading
From Streetscapes by Zeit: Street names are stories of life. They tell us something about how the people in a given place work and live, what they believe in and their dreams. There are more than a… | Continue reading
Reading visualization research papers can often feel like a slog. As a necessity, there’s usually a lot of jargon, references to William Cleveland and Robert McGill, and sometimes perception … | Continue reading
A combination of a bivariate area chart, animation, and a population pyramid, with a sprinkling of detail and annotation. | Continue reading
Charles-Joseph Minard, best known for a graphic he made (during retirement, one year before his death) showing Napoleon’s March, made many statistical graphics over his career. The Minard Sys… | Continue reading
The Earth Puzzle by generative design studio Nervous System has no defined borders. You put it together how you want. Start anywhere and see where your journey takes you. This puzzle is based on an… | Continue reading
Election night has become quite the event for newsrooms and graphics departments over the years, and visualization production cycle has started to feel more familiar each time. | Continue reading
Ben Schmidt uses deep scatterplots to visualize millions of data points. It’s a combination of algorithm-based display and hiding of points as you zoom in and out like you might an interactiv… | Continue reading
The Guardian goes with scaled, angled arrows to show the Republican and Democrat swings in these midterms for the House compared against those of 2016. It reminds me of the classic wind-like map by… | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence, given its name, sounds like a computer learns everything its own. However, a set of algorithms can only become useful if there’s something to learn from: data. Dave L… | Continue reading
Data grows more intertwined with the everyday and more involved in important decisions. However, data is biased in many ways from collection, to analysis, and the conclusions, which is a problem wh… | Continue reading
xkcd referenced the ever-so-loved forecasting needle. I’m so not gonna look at it this year. Maybe. | Continue reading
A meme that cried “jobs not mobs” began modestly, but a couple of weeks later it found its way into a slogan used by the President of the United States. Keith Collins and Kevin Roose fo… | Continue reading
The Economist built an election model that treats demographic variables like blocks that output a probability of voting Republican or Democrat: Our model adds up the impact of each variable, like a… | Continue reading