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Welcome to the latest issue of the 'Visualising Data Newsletter', chronicling the most insightful and delightful data viz content every month, straight to your inbox.

Each month I collect, curate, then publish a selection of links to 50 of the best, most interesting, most thought-provoking data visualisation-related content I've encountered during the previous month. This month's issue relates to content I saw published during October 2024.

I hope you continue to find this newsletter useful whether you are working on a dataviz, working in dataviz, or working towards working in dataviz. To catch up on all previous monthly issues visit my Newsletter page.

Thanks for reading and see you next month.

Andy

Latest from me...

Firstly, some recent posts or announcements relating to my professional services and activities.

Visuals

The freshest data visualisation (or related) design pieces and collections.

5. I hate the night | The Guardian​

"Their hopes for peace fading and fearful of being forgotten, two Gazans share the trauma of living their days and nights surrounded by the noise of gunfire, missiles and drones". Powerful inclusion of first-person-collective sounds clips make this a necessarily distressing work to experience.

6. PolyBio Consortium Project Explorer | PolyBio​

Created by Giorgia Lupi and her Pentagram team who "designed, illustrated and developed an interactive digital platform... offering a living repository that brings their scientific discoveries to life, reimagining how data can be explored and turning PolyBio’s research into an accessible journey for both scientists and the broader public."

7. The Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index (CCVI) | Climate Conflict​

Another superstar development, this time led by Moritz Stefaner and his team "This project provides a bird’s eye view on global climate and conflict risks, in high temporal and spatial resolution." (Comes with this short thread for some key details)

8. Park at your own risk | Nightingale​

"Seattle’s parking tickets pull in millions - but who’s cashing in? This deep dive unravels the surprising partnerships and hidden profits fueling the city’s parking enforcement machine." As Jason Forrest remarks 'This fully interactive article in Nightingale is truly a new first for us!' so bravo to all involved.

9. The Tortured Data Viz Department: An Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Lyrics | Kelsey Nanan on Nightingale​

And here's another lovely piece published on Nightingale (with the interactive visual natively found on Observable) created and written about by Kelsey who was motivated to explore Taylor swift's lyrics after being struck by the lyrical depth of the album 'The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD)'

10. Trump’s Changing Messages on Abortion, in 660 Quotes | TheUpshot​

Donald Trump lies, contradicts himself, and says things he doesn't believe in. Not news. But always enlightening and head-shaking to see it revealed so starkly by data. This is a smart qualitative investigation.

11. #30DayChartChallenge | Ihar Yanouski​

Ihar is a talented freelance data visualisation designer and developer based in Belarus and I very much like the style, creativity and variety of the charts he made for the April 2024 #30DayChartChallenge.

12. Hidden Patterns in Folk Songs Reveal How Music Evolved | Scientific American​

"Songs and speech across cultures suggest music developed similar features around the world"

13. On Standby | Loud Numbers​

Another piece from the sonic minds of Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere, this work (love the title!) 'On Standby' is a "piece of sound art designed to be listened to while sleeping. It’s based on data collected by seven different people in Malmö, Sweden. Each of those people used a smart plug to collect data on the energy consumption of a device in their home over the course of a single night, the night of 25th August 2024"

14. The new American Dream should be a townhouse | Washington Post

Lots to admire, as always, in this work by Amanda Shendruk and Heather Long - especially the isometric buildings and the occasional companion isometric bar chart!

15. Exploring the Scientific Conversation Regarding Live Tissue Training in Trauma Surgery: A Bibliometric Analysis | Will Stahl-Timmins on Science Direct​

A typically excellent and elegant visual treatment from Will that is a stark reminder that not all visualisation solutions are about, can be about, and should be about making things simple (which is reductive). Often they have the intent of conveying the exceptionally complicated AND complex underlying characteristics of a subject, as this does brilliantly.

16. Heating up | Zach Bowders on Tableau Public​

Love his clever solution from Zach who visualises the "heating up (and cooling off) of the major film genres in this viz based upon nearly a half million films in 21 genres released over 120 years"

17. Taking Stock of Our Oceans’ Tides | Dave Taylor on Maps.com​

A map of real beauty explore the "Oceanic oscillations of the world's tides at their greatest ranges"

18. Plant Futures​

Exquisite piece of work led by artist Annelie Berner who was responsible for the concept, research, design, programming, and creation: "Plant Futures envisions how a flower might show climate data, data that could eventually shape our familiar surroundings into something entirely new."

19. Halloween Candy by Cost and Love | Nathan Yau​

"The old FiveThirtyEight ran a head-to-head between Halloween candies years ago. I used the data for the above, which should be taken very seriously."

20. 30 Year Average of UK Temperature and Rainfall | Neil Kaye on Bluesky​

"During the 20th century the UK climatology followed a path around a confined box. With global warming and climate change they have escaped out the box." A strong use-case for the specific value of an animated connected scatter plot.

21. Personal well-being in the UK | Tamás Varga​

Just a really elegant small multiples work with many nice details, not least the page fold acting as a subtle marker for the Pandemic.

Learning

Relevant articles, interviews, or videos to help further your development in data viz.

25. Our National Parks at Your Service | Joshua Stevens on Maps.com​

"The National Park Service has earned a reputation as having some of the best maps in the world." This piece profiles and encourages an exploration of the 1000+ NPS maps that are free to download, print, and enjoy: "Each map is worthy of deep study and appreciation, with thoughtful design showcasing some of the best cartography in the field"

26. Best of Data Viz Style Guides | Amy Cesal on Bluesky​

"In order to highlight some of the unique and good things from data viz style guides Jon Schwabish, Max Graze, Alan Wilson and myself are publishing a new series highlighting things we like about data viz guidelines and why they work."

27. My late journey into AI tools—and how that could help you too | Evelina Parrou​

"Have you ever tried a new app only after the hype died down? That was me with AI... Turns out, AI tools are not that bad. Let me share my experiences with the big three AI assistants and how I actually use them in my work"

28. Paper: Business Data Visualization, Beyond the Boring | EagerEyes​

"In this new paper in CG&A Visualization Viewpoints, I cover a range of preconceived ideas that I think keep researchers from wanting to work on business data vis, and point out some interesting research directions."

29. ESG needs data design [Part 1] [Part 2] | CLEVER°FRANKE

UX designer Lauren Lundholm discusses how CLEVER°FRANKE consider the best ways to present and communicate ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) scores.

30. A retrospective of 15 years of data visualization projects | Gregor Aisch on Datawrapper​

"This week, I had a few days off from my new job and took some time to update my portfolio website. It brought back good memories of the many things I’ve done over the years, so I got curious and started to collect metadata about all the projects I’ve listed on my site." (My favourite moment here is in seeing the table of chart types Gregor has made and seeing Needle 1 at the very bottom)

31. Overwhelmed by the IEEE VIS paper list? | John Guerra on Twitter​

"I built a dataviz tool to help you quickly find the most relevant research! Enter a query and find related papers". This could have been posted under 'Visuals' but its such an incredibly helpful way to browse the body of research and learn so its sat here. John is a master builder of insightful networks and this is his latest incredibly helpful contribution.

32. Getting creative with academic posters... | Emily Alger on Twitter​

Love this way of making a printed experience interactive.

33. 2024 Georgian Parliamentary Election | Europe Elects on Bluesky​

A fascinating thread demonstrating how data viz can help to expose election fraud.

34. Good Morning Data #6 | The X,Y Files | Julie Brunet on Nightingale​

Julie shares her experiences and (valid) frustrations of working with particular types of clients: " I’m talking about the peculiar ones with whom all communication attempts seem to fail, the ones that speak in tongues, the ones that let you wonder if you heard correctly every time they formulate a request."

35. Maps and visualizations we’re keeping an eye on for Election Day | Stamen​

The first of a three-part series from Kelsey Taylor ahead of the US election that, though its now in the past, is still really insightful to read anyway but also to read back with hindsight. Covers polling, indicators, and down-ballot races and electoral math.

36. Examining data visualization pitfalls in scientific publications | NIH​

From 2021 but ever-relevant: "To address common pitfalls in graphical representations, this paper focuses on identifying and understanding the root causes of misinformation in graphical representations. We reviewed the misleading data visualization examples in the scientific publications collected from indexing databases and then projected them onto the fundamental units of visual communication such as color, shape, size, and spatial orientation."

37. Data Wink Ratio | Matt Brehmer on LinkedIn​

Introducing the Emoji Encoder for generating semantically-resonant unit charts

38. "Must Be a Tuesday:" Affect, Attribution, and Geographic Variability in Equity-Oriented Visualizations of Population Health Disparities | OSF Preprints

Very interesting new study from Eli Holder and Lace Padilla exploring equity impacts of public health dataviz.

39. Data Visualization Teaching and Learning Materials | Aarhus University​

A huge collection of links to textbooks and lecture notes, lecture videos and slides, tutorials and notebooks, exercises and other materials curated by Hans-Jõrg Schulz

40. What Can GenAI (Really) Do for Data Visualization? | Enrico Bertini on Substack​

Insightful write up from Enrico reporting on the learnings to emerge from a new panel he and Paolo Ciuccarelli organized at Northeastern University’s Center for Design covering topics at the intersection of Data Visualization and AI.

News

Latest developments, announcements, or announcements affecting the data viz world.

43. Information is Beautiful Awards 2024​

News about the latest round of awards, with details about guidelines, dates, and classifications.

44. Announcing Color Buddy | Andrew McNutt​

"I'm excited to announce the release of our tool Color Buddy! It’s a vis color palette designer built on good color science" and emerging from research involving Andrew, Maureen Stone, and Jeffrey Heer which gives it a huge amount of credibility.

Sundries

Additional references to pieces covering broader data, tech, or design matters.

46. Revisiting Donald Appleyard's Livable Streets | Streetfilmsvlog on Youtube​

Exploring the notion of ‘Livable Streets’, originally coined by Donald Appleyard: "Appleyard demonstrated that people living on a street with relatively heavy traffic had only one-third as many social connections as people living on a relatively light-traffic street."

47. In our time | Shelby.cool​

A visual index of episodes of the BBC radio show 'In Our Time', categorised by "five top-level categories (science, philosophy, history, culture, and religion) with the ability to browse by title, category, description, and guests in a searchable list or 3D visualization".

48. Guess the candy from its CT scan | JonBruner on Twitter​

"We CT scanned a dozen candy bars. Can you identify all of these?"

49. ‘We’re not nerds in lab coats’ – a day with Opta’s number-crunchers | The Times​

"Ever wondered how the football scientists capture 3,000 pieces of ‘event data’ per match, logging every pass, tackle, shot and interception?"

50. Squint at this... | Gavin Buckingham on Bluesky​

A sweary visual illusion.

Thanks for reading!

I’m ANDY KIRK, an independent data visualisation expert currently based in the UK. My vision is to deliver data viz excellence, everywhere. I offer data visualisation professional services to clients worldwide in my capacity as a design consultant, a prolific and experienced trainer, as a four-times published author, as a researcher and sought-after speaker. I'm editor of visualisingdata.com and host of the Explore Explain video and podcast series. If you have a desire to elevate your data viz capabilities, whether at the start of your journey or further along, get in touch.

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