By Andy Kirk | May 23, 2017 | 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 March 2017.

Visualisations & Infographics

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

The Guardian | 'How to finish a novel: tracking a book's progress from idea to completion'

Pudding | 'How Music Taste Evolved : Every top 5 song, from 1958 - 2016'

WSJ | 'Blue Feed, Red Feed: See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side'

National Geographic | 'The world's top cities for people and the planet'

Data Cuisine | Profiling the work created at the 'Data Cuisine Workshop Pristina, Kosovo'

Rock the VizComm | 'Love and Happiness in Anna Karenina'

NewCo Shift | 'Lynchburg, Virginia: The Most Typical City in America - Creating Context for Cities'

Planet Explorer | 'With this tool you can see the Earth change by navigating backwards and forwards using the timeline'

National Geographic | 'The tools animals use'

Meteor Showers | 'All major meteor showers'

Lena Groeger | Great collection of data viz gifs

fiftythirtytwenty | 'Income + Financial Stability in America' work by two talented members of my previous MICA cohort

Alessandro Zotta | 'On their way to Syria: The journey of foreign fighters' - winner of the Malofiej 25 Best in Show Infographic

Tableau | 'A Day in the Life of the Tube'

Gapminder | 'In the news people in other cultures seem stranger than they are. We visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos. See how people really live'

Articles

These items are more article-focused, so includes discussion, discourse, interviews and videos

Medium | '2017 Data Visualization Survey Results'

Medium | Building on the above, further discourse from Elijah about the state of the field: 'If Data Visualization is So Hot, Why Are People Leaving?'

Medium | Related piece... 'There be dragons: dataviz in the industry'

Medium | Another follow-up... 'Visualizing, The Field: Finding Our Way'

Medium | ...and still more from Elijah! 'Defining Custom Data Visualization'

Excel Charts | Companion post to a presentation titled 'An evaluation of data visualization practices of statistical institutes.'

Storytelling With Data | 'Building acceptance and adoption'

Chad Skelton | 'A different way to think about "Data Storytelling"'

Sciolistic Ramblings | 'Data Visualisation: Lonely Hearts Club'

Medium | 'Designers vs Developers', a write-up of a talk given by Accurat at Visualized Milan

Robin Kwong | 'How do we create a need for news?'

FT Data | 'How to make 3D charts great again'

Info We Trust | A great, growing series of articles about classic visualisations and visualisers

Medium | 'The death of interactive infographics?'

vis4.net | ... in response (kind of) 'In Defense of Interactive Graphics'

Medium | ...and more defending! This from Irene Ros 'In Defense of Simplicity, A Data Visualization Journey'

Visual Cinnamon | 'My journey into data visualization: How does an Astronomer end up in data visualization anyway?'

Data Brit | Nice summary of Brit's 'Takeaways from the 2017 Tapestry Conference'

Catherine Madden Relay | On a related theme, here's a roundup of Catherine's collection of outrageously brilliant visual notes from Tapestry

Chez Voila | ...and lastly, a review from Francis Gagnon 'Tapestry 2017: Connecting the Dots'

Medium | 'Picture, Depiction and Deception: Why Data Visualisations are Cultural Images'

Scientific American | 'Visualizing Uncertain Weather'

PolicyViz | 'What is Story?'

Learning & Development

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

Tapestry | '10 Data Storytelling Videos from Tapestry 2017'

YouTube | 'Do Maps Lie? - Why Numbers Matter, Episode 2'

Steve Haroz | Paper: 'The Connected Scatterplot for Presenting Paired Time Series'

Data+Science | A thoughtful critique of treemaps: 'Using Treemaps to Visualize Data '

SoundCloud | 'How can we deal with data better? How can we teach kids to deal with data better? Sarah Morris from the nonprofit Nuclear Learning Network has some answers'

Perceptual Edge | 'Data Visualization Effectiveness Profile'

Kaggle | 'Welcome to Kaggle Datasets:The best place to discover and seamlessly analyze open data'

GitHub | 'Let's Make Some Gifs!' - really useful tutorials by Lena Groeger

Eager Eyes | 'Sonification: The Power, The Problems'

Susie Lu | 'd3-annotation' helps you to overcome some of the challenges of adding annotations to d3 visualisations

Mike Vizneros | 'Not a Violin Chart' - a great process and discussion piece from Mike

Medium | 'The Heart Deconstructed: A look at how We Were Strangers Once Too went from concept to reality'

vis4.net/ | 'Re-coloring Illustrator graphics based on JSON data files'

mjfoster83 | 'Life as a Modern Day Cartographer: Redefining Cartography for the 21st Century'

Vimeo | 'How do we know that?' talk by Robert Kosara

Medium | 'The Challenges of Dataset for Data Visualization Tools'

Slides.com | 'Who should tell the data stories? Stats offices vs. the media

Lisa Charlotte Rost | 'Why Do We Visualise Data?'

LarsVers | 'Winter Olympics: A history of the white games in words and data'

Subject News

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

TechCrunch | 'Backed by LocalGlobe, London-based Flourish launches data visualisation platform'

The Guardian | 'Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion'

Raw Graphs | 'Introduction to RAW Graphs' (new version)

Graphics Link | The 21st 'Information Visualisation Society' International Conference, 11 - 14 July 2017 in London

Adventures in Mapping | Introducing the 'Lego-ifier'

Market Cafe Mag | 'Market Cafe Magazine is a quarterly zine about data visualization' - Issue 1 was released in march

iguacel | 'Explore winners of the 25th Malofiej International Infographics Awards'

Stats Life | 'BBC 'immensely grateful' for RSS input into new stats guidelines'

Poynter | '10 years in, The New York Times is tweaking its Interactive News team to empower reporters'

Google Cloud | 'Google Cloud Platform adds new tools for easy data preparation and integration'

Macalester College | 'Welcome to the World of Cartograph'

Microsoft | 'Timeline Storyteller'

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

The Guardian | 'Big data’s power is terrifying. That could be good news for democracy'

NBC News | or... 'How Big Data Broke American Politics'

Politiken | '16 children – 16 photos: Click the black background and switch on their reality'

Design Taxi | 'Brutally Honest Illustrations By A 29-Year-Old Creative That Reflect Adulthood'

Vimeo | 'Every NYT front page since 1852'

The Guardian | 'Expected goals and Big Football Data: the statistics revolution that is here to stay'

Wordpress.com/ | 'Introducing WordPress.com for Google Docs: A New Way Forward for Collaborative Editing'

Twitter | 'Microsoft has an *incredible* corpus on inclusive design + accessibility.'

Twitter | 'toilet paper visualization of the difference between zero and null'

New York Times | 'We Have Some Good News on the California Drought. Take a Look.' (the photography in this...)

BBC | 'Think again: Will circular runways ever take off?'

Google Maps | 'Wireless Passwords From Airports And Lounges Around The World'

Sketchfab | 'Discover a million things in 3D and VR'

FT | 'The problem with facts: Tim Harford on how today’s politicians deal with inconvenient truths'

Boing Boing | 'Trump's Time Magazine interview about truthfulness, minus all the lies'

FiveThirtyEight | 'Why Do We Count?'