Best of the visualisation web… December 2019

At the end of each month I pull together a collection of links to some of the most relevant, interesting or thought-provoking web content I’ve come across during the previous month. Here’s the latest collection from December 2019. (Note that some links lead to paywall items, for which you may have limited access before having to pay).

Visualisations & Infographics

Covering latest visualisation, infographic or other related design works.

Bloomberg | ‘Drivers Refuse to Put Down Their Phones. People Keep Dying.’

FT | ‘Mapping inequality in the UK from the Victorian era to the 2019 election’

@marian42_ | ‘I created an interactive visualization of 150000+ butterflies in the @NHM_London using deep learning, t-SNE and data from @NHM_Digitise’

@MattChorley | Some excellent visualisation work in this thread that points to the Times’ collected ‘UK election results in maps and charts’

Scientific American | ‘Scientific American’s Colorful Covers Reveal 175 Years of Change’

The Guardian | ‘How did Boris Johnson achieve his landslide victory? A visual guide’

@physicsJ | ‘2-D rotations of the planets shown to relative scale, eg. Jupiter rotates around 2.4 times faster than Earth’

@undertheraedar | ‘An updated constituency/deprivation chart for England for the 2019 general election’

Neal.Fun | ‘The Deep Sea’

Reuters | ‘A plateful of plastic: Visualising the amount of microplastic we eat’

New York Times | ‘These are the actual locations for millions of Americans. At the New York Stock Exchange…’

@AdrianBlancoR | ‘Excited to see how this page turned out for the @capitalweather Gang’s Winter Weather Guide in today’s paper.’

Tableau | ‘Polygonal Cities’

The Economist | ‘Voting Lib Dem could hurt the Tories as much as Labour’ – a rarely spotted connected ternary plot in the wild!

@AlexSelbyB | ‘I love this visual round-up of the year’s news from @JamesFransham, especially the bit about Liverpool’s miraculous comeback against Barcelona ‘

@ChrisLuv | ‘Here I explore the RGB colours and find what they are likely be called, and how many other colours we’d also name the same’

@eleanor_lutz | ‘Trying a new map style for rock climbing solutions!’

Nesta | ‘Around 350 paper pyramids showing the relationship between deprivation and the cuts to local authorities across England’

Road to Larissa | ‘Pitchfork’s Best of the Year Over the Decade’

Data Ventures | ‘Interested in NZ’s population? We’ve visualised parts of Aotearoa like you’ve never seen them before’

@jburnmurdoch | ‘Our full story is now out analysing what drove the Tories’ victory: Chart thread:’

@JohnMuyskens | ‘We mapped land and ocean temperature observations from 1701-2018 to show how we take the temperature of the planet’

Jug Cerović | ‘Schematic map of Japan’s Shinkansen high speed train network’

Washington Post | ‘The Trump impeachment inquiry, told with maps and dancing Rudys’

New York Times | ‘Compare your city’s air with the World’s most polluted air, in AugmentedReality’

@Mark_A_Eaton | ‘This is amazing – the launch of @EuroBirdPortal Live. Mapping of Europe’s migrant birds in (nearly) real-time – right up to yesterday’s data – using records from 120,000 birdwatchers’

@metoffice | ‘The time for action is now. #ClimateChange’

@mikebrondbjerg | ‘Ran all 3,384 stills from the Blade Runner 2049 Trailer, through my #processing #voxel filter (brightness = depth)’

NY Books | ‘The Rising Cost of Not Living’

@NHinternesch | ‘ave you ever wondered what a week’s worth of traffic on a news website sounds like? ‘

NATS | ‘Every year, NATS handles more than 2.5 million flights. Take a journey through the skies, learn the language of aviation and see how NATS Air Traffic Controllers safely guide a real domestic flight from London Heathrow to Manchester.’

Washington Post | ‘It’s been XX days since a high-profile departure from the Trump administration’

ABC | ‘See how global warming has changed the world since your childhood’

New York Times | ‘New York’s Subway Map Like You’ve Never Seen It Before’

BBC | ‘General election 2019: Animated tour in 10 stops’

Articles

These are references to written articles, discourse or interviews about visualisation.

Maarten Lambrechts | ‘The 2019 List of Visualisation Lists is already here!’

Nightingale | ‘2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream’

Multiple Views | ‘The Curious Absence of Uncertainty from Many (Most?) Visualizations’

LinkedIn | ‘Beyond Bar Charts and Pie Charts’

Forth Go | ‘Bar-Meko Chart Study’

Nightingale | ‘How I Quit My Full-Time Job to Pursue a Freelance Career As a Data Visualization Designer’

Questions in Dataviz | ‘How can we visualise decimal numbers?’

Multiple Views | ‘Visualizing Trends on Mobile Phones: Animation or Small Multiples?’

Infographics for the People | ‘Making better data viz: Acknowledging our mistakes, and learning from them.’

Cartonerd | ‘My favourite maps of 2019’

The Outline | ‘Here’s the typography of the next decade, the age of font minimalism is coming to a close’

Multiple Views | ‘Same Data, Multiple Perspectives: Curse of Expertise in Visual Data Communication’

BBC Future | ‘Why progress bars can make you feel better’

@infowetrust | ‘for Advent I am making palettes inspired by a set of French thematic maps…’

@tjukanov | ‘Thread: #30DayMapChallenge wrapped up.’

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, podcasts, academic papers, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Data Stories | ‘Year in Review 2019’

@aLucasLopez | Typically wonderful design thread from Alberto – ‘Holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, modern Jerusalem has been shaped by 3,000 years of worship, conquest, devastation, and rebuilding’

@chadskelton | ‘How do you teach data visualization to people who really don’t care about data visualization? Here’s what I’ve learned from doing just that for the past five years’

Policy Viz | ‘Here’s a quick video of how I made the Guardian’s Radial Map in Excel’

Olivia Vane | ‘My thesis ‘Timeline design for visualising cultural heritage data’ is online’

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, such as new sites or resources, new book titles and other notable developments.

Datawrapper | ‘Create data viz with Datawrapper, with our new, strong free plan’

Information+ | ‘The next Information+ conference will be held September 24th-27th, 2020 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia (USA)’

Fullstack | New Book: ‘Build beautiful data visualizations with D3’ by Amelia Wattenberger

Malofiej | ‘We are proud to confirm the speakers for Malofiej 28’

@marian42 | Making of the project above ‘Visualizing 150000 butterflies from the Natural History Museum’

National Geographic | ‘National Geographic and Sky Ocean Ventures Award $1.3 Million as the Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge Winners Are Announced’

Graphic Hunters | ‘The second S-H-O-W conferenc will take place on April 2 & 3, 2020 in Utrecht, the Netherlands’

@SParsonsDataViz | ‘Welcome to my new website! “Reflections in Design”‘

Sundries

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data, technology or visual theme.

The Guardian | ‘Cranky Uncle game takes on climate crisis denial and fake news’

@k0a1a | ‘I never realised there was a way of learning Morse code in such a visual way’

@nerdishtendency | ‘The @nytimes Graphics editor @archietse, as he appears on a poster conceived by @Duenes, was just portrayed on @nbcsnl’

@jcrutchmer | ‘Making saturday’s
@nytimes front page’

@OmarChaudhuri | ‘This has no intention of being a serious political commentary… here’s how constituencies containing a Premier League or Football League stadium voted in the General Election’

BBC | ‘Why is the world’s financial plumbing under pressure?’