By Andy Kirk | March 6, 2016 | Collections

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 January 2016.

Visualisations/Infographics

Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery.

Simon Scarr | 'A look back at 2015'

Bloomberg | 'Cashing in on Crossovers'

Wall Street Journal | 'After 7 Years of Slow Growth, U.S. Now Sees More of Same'

Washington Post | 'At ‘State U.,’ a surge of students from out of state'

Flowing Data | Nathan continues the 'death' trilogy with 'Causes of Death'

Flowing Data | and then concludes it with 'How You Will Die'

Polygraph | 'Crowdsourcing the Definition of "Punk"'

FT | 'Djokovic’s 2015 was the greatest ever men's tennis season'

Dueling Data | 'An analysis of The Beatles'

Interactive Things | Love this 'Interactive Things brand guidelines'

Citylab | 'A Map of Global Nuclear Weapons Brings 'WarGames' into the 21st Century'

Density Design | 'Migration backstage'

roadtolarissa | 'Minute by Minute Point Differentials of 2015 NBA Games'

Martin Grandjean | 'Network visualization: mapping Shakespeare’s tragedies'

Jill Hubley | 'New York City: Greenhouse Gas Emissions'

NYPL | Explore over 187K digital items released in to the public domain by the New York Public Library

Washington Post | 'State of the Union: Obama’s greatest hits'

FiveThirtyEight | 'Our 47 Weirdest Charts From 2015'

Visual Loop | Some beautiful Star Wars infographics from Alfredo Peralta

TheUpshot | 'The 202 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List'

ProPublica | 'The 2015 ProPublica Year in Visual Storytelling'

NYT | 'The David Bowie Song That Fans Are Listening to Most: ‘Heroes’'

Brilliant Maps | 'How Much of Humanity is on Your Side of World?'

Project Ukko | 'Seasonal wind predictions for the energy sector'

Well-Formed Data | 'Little boxes' - "Would the field of data vis benefit from a clear line between art and design?"

QZ | 'Why infectious bacteria are winning'

Ben Schmidt | 'The State of the Union in Context'

Washington Post | 'The mathematically proven strategy to win 14 of the most popular games'

Visual Loop | 'The Trace of the Moon'

Polygraph | 'Hollywood's gender divide and its effect on films'

ThermalPlot | 'Visualizing Multi-Attribute Time-Series Data Using a Thermal Metaphor'

Truth and Beautry | '-ach, -ingen, -zell: A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in the endings of German town and village names.'

Articles

The emphasis on these items is that they are less about visualisation images and are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse, interviews and videos

Medium | '2016: A Watershed Year for Data Visualization'

MIT | '50 years of Data Science' an essay by Stanford statistics professor David Donoho from 2015

Medium | ...and here are some comments about it

Medium | 'Beautiful Reasons: Engaging Aesthetics for Data Narratives'

HBR | 'Is That Chart Saying What You Think It’s Saying?'

CGWTF | Some interesting thoughts about some of the pitfalls experienced in research collaborations

FT | 'Crafting charts that can withstand the data deluge'

Gravy Anecdote | 'Dataviz criticism: know the author’s intentions first'

Data, etc. | 'Felton Annual Report — A Eulogy'

Computer Weekly | 'English Rugby Football League uses data analytics to boost performance'

Storytelling with Data | 'Is there a single right answer?'

Ted | 'How to use data to make a hit TV show'

Jonathan Gray | Talk: “Ways of Seeing Data: Towards a Critical Literacy for Data Visualisations as Research Objects and Devices”, University of Amsterdam, 14th January 2016

Chartbeat | 'The Data behind the Most-Read Article of 2015'

Info We Trust | 'Turning Data into Cash: How to create meaningful businesses with information'

MIT Center for Civic Media | 'What would feminist data visualization look like?'

Medium | 'Whose Grid Map is better? Quality Metrics for Grid Map Layouts'

FastCo Design | 'Why Desktop UX Still Has Something To Teach Mobile'

Learning & Development

These links cover presentations, tutorials, resources, learning opportunities, case-studies, how-tos etc.

Cartonerd | 'Not a very (oil) slick map' good critical analysis of a choropleth map

YouTube | Daniel Shiffman's excellent youtube channels of video tutorials for learning code

Infragistics | 'Demystifying Box-and-whisker Plots — Part 2' (link in article to Part 1)

Medium | 'Experimentation with globes in Blender 3D'

Ghostweather Blog | 'Teaching a Semester of D3.js'

Jagoda | Interesting site about 'Interactive visual thinking research'

Storybench | 'How a boutique data design company visualized global scientific collaboration for nature magazine'

Maarten Lambrechts | 'Interaction tracking for your interactives'

Medium | 'Hypothetical Outcome Plots: Experiencing the Uncertain'

The Learning Network (NYT) | 'Lesson Plan - Analyzing Maps to Better Understand Global Current Events and History'

EagerEyes | Paper: 'Presentation-b Visualization Techniques'

The Functional Art | 'Research on persuasive visualization and risk communication'

Maarten Lambrechts | Video: 'How Belgium is heating up, a making of'

Perceptual Edge | 'Information Visualization Research Projects that Would Benefit Practitioners'

CartoDB | 'Visualize 2015 Urban Populations with Proportional Symbols'

Subject News

Includes announcements within the field, brand new sites, new (to me) sites, new books and generally interesting developments.

NYT Co | 'Amanda Cox Named Editor, The Upshot'

Data Basic | 'DataBasic is a suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data'

SITE | New Conference: Information+ - 'Interdisciplinary practices in information design and visualization' taking place in Vancouver June 16–18, 2016

VizWiz | Andys Kriebel and Cotgreave launch the 'Makeover Monday Challenge'

ProPublica | 'ProPublica Summer Data Institute'

Vis&More | New blog from Tamara Munzner!

Sundries

Any other items that may or may not be directly linked to data visualisation but might have a data/technology focus or just seem worthy of sharing

One Perfect Shot | A video essay about the art of composition in filmic storytelling

BuzzFeed | '13 Charts That Will Make Total Sense To People With Impostor Syndrome'

Blendoku | 'The original color puzzle game!'

Slate | 'Every David Bowie Hairstyle From 1964 to 2014, in One GIF'

Dolly Chops | (linked to the above) Some really amazing illustrations and gif animations by Helen Green

Creative Review | 'Graphic Designers Surveyed – the findings'

Glittering Blue | 'This is one day’s observations from Himawari-8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop'

BuzzFeed | 'How BuzzFeed News Used Betting Data To Investigate Match-Fixing In Tennis'

This is Colossal | 'Istanbul Inception: Warped Turkish Cityscapes by Aydin Büyüktas'

Go Into The Story | 'Over 100 Free, Legal Movie Script PDF Downloads'

Thenmap | 'Thenmap is a repository for historical borders.'

Catch | 'What happens when men design tech for women? These 5 utterly daft devices'

Weird News in Local Newspapers | 'David Bowie: Desperate local angle news reporting'

Weekly Times | 'Vintage cultivation pattern used to save topsoil after bushfire'