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Welcome to the 4th 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 new content I saw published in April.
There are four distinct sections: Visuals, Learning, News, and a collection of random adjacent creative or design type items wrapped together as Sundries.
Each item is presented with the piece's title, the platform or author, and then a description, which is often lifted from any introduction text accompanying the original published piece. Links to each item are included in the title, the image (for 10 items) and via the 'Go' buttons. Note that some links point to sites that are behind paywalls for which some readers may not have direct or immediate access.
To accommodate people interested in this content but technically impeded from receiving it in email form, web versions of each issue will be published on my website's 'Newsletter' page two weeks after each issue is sent via email. That page will also offer a growing archive of all monthly issues.
I hope you continue to find this newsletter to be a useful resource, whether you are working on a dataviz, working in dataviz, or working to get working in dataviz.
See you same time, same place, in June.
Andy
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Latest from me...
To begin with some quick updates, posts or announcements relating to my professional services and activities.
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Since the last newsletter I launched the new season of my Explore Explain podcast and video series. The first episode featured two of my favourite people in dataviz, Rebecca Conroy and Duncan Swain from Beyond Words as we explore their story founding a dataviz design studio and the values behind its enduring success.
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Also released in the last month, episode 2 welcomed the brilliant Jess Carr who designed a report profiling her wonderful digital analysis of the use of text on front covers of Vogue magazine.
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My next in-person public training course is taking place in London over 10-11 July, with only a few places now remaining. Details in the link above. There are various discounts available, including to newsletter subscribers: Sign up for the next issue and you'll see the code published then. To make the course accessible to all, two places are available on a 'pay what you can afford' basis - these two places remain unclaimed at the time of publishing.
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My next virtual training course is taking place on Zoom over Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 August, with two 3-hour workshops running 2pm to 5pm (UK, BST) on each day. As with all training courses there are different discounts available which you can read about in the posting. This course is currently offered at the early-bird reduced rate through to the end of June. To make the course accessible to all, two places are available on a 'pay what you can afford' basis.
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For people unable to travel to join my in-person Masterclass in London, I have scheduled a virtual running of this course taking place on Zoom over Tuesday 10, Wednesday 11, and Thursday 12 September, with three 4-hour workshops running 1pm to 5pm (UK, BST) on each day. Again, for all training courses there are various discounts available for which the details are listed in the post. This course is available at the early-bird reduced rate through to 12 July. To make the course accessible to all, two places are available on a 'pay what you can afford' basis.
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Visuals
The freshest data visualisation (or related) design pieces and collections.
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1. Mass incarceration devastated S.F. Japantown. For the first time, we know how much | San Francisco Chronicle
Outstanding research, reporting, imagery, and graphics from Nami Sumida et al about the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the second world war which devastated the once thriving neighbourhood, Japantown.
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2. How Israel-Hamas War Has Reshaped Rafah in Gaza | Bloomberg
Incredible team effort to create detailed maps showing detailed locations of building damage and the setting up of tent sites in Rafah. See also this short thread by visual journalist Krishna Kara.
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3. March 2024 Streamflow | USGS
I love these tile maps showing a month of streamflow conditions across the U.S.
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4. What I offered, what she ate, what she grabbed | Or Misgav (Instagram)
Or's Instagram account is a charming and tremendous feed full of clever hand made visuals and I just loved this smart Venn diagram like chart
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5. Data Vis Dispatch, April 23 | Datawrapper
Always an essential read, but I especially appreciated the round-up in this issue of some of the best submissions to the #30DayChartChallenge
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6. Plastic unfantastic: what’s banned in Hong Kong’s war on waste | SCMP
'Hong Kong is taking a major step in its war on waste by banning many single-use plastics. New rules, which come into force on the symbolic date of April 22, 2024 – on Earth Day – aim to cut down on non-biodegradable plastics in landfill sites'. Here’s a visual guide to those new rules.
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A single place to access all the wonderful history of sport related visualisations and infographics from the talented team at Mundo Deportivo
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8. European State of the Climate | Copernicus
The latest report on the state of our climate "with a fresh new look, a designed summary for those who have no time to dig into the details, interactive graphics and a map with the key events that affected Europe in 2023 that you can explore" (Excellent dataviz work by Anna Lombardi in particular)
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9. The migrant highway that could sway the US Election | FT
"Our new project investigates the impact of the Darién Gap on US-bound migration and its potential effect on the upcoming US election."
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10. "Pass leaders by zone for the 2023-24 NBA season" | Todd Whitehead via Twitter
The title may not make it seem worth a click, but it is worth a click
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11. A23a: Tracking the world's biggest iceberg as it drifts towards oblivion | BBC
"The world's biggest iceberg - more than twice the size of Greater London - is on the move. After a few weeks loitering on the fringes of Antarctica, it’s begun to drift at pace once more."
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12. Critical infrastructure – worldwide | Der Spiegel
"Risk to critical infrastructure: The global economy is vulnerable here"
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13. Rental vacancies along the US eclipse path | Jamie Lane via Twitter
"With the eclipse approaching in less than a week, over half of U.S. cities along the eclipse's path are fully booked for the night of April 7th" Love how the data absolutely delivers here.
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14. When to not use a map | Joshua Stevens via Twitter
The tweet is from Josh praising a great non-map from Wall Street Journal: "Maps are not always the only—or even best—choice to communicate spatial data."
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15. New year celebrations across Asia | Kontinentalist via Instagram
"What’s in a year? In our latest story, we look at the various new year celebrations across Asia, and trace them to the various calendar systems they’re based on."
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16. Toxic Ingredients in Fragrances? | Bloomberg
More Marie Patino magnificence investigating scented products with potentially harmful ingredients. Its also worth checking out her thread showing the iterations of her jars of cream visual.
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17. Close | Nat Henry via Twitter
"Today I'm launching Close, an interactive map that shows walkable, bikeable, and transit-friendly neighborhoods across every block in the United States"
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18. What Polling Can't Tell you | Reuters
"How do we know poll data accurately represents American demographics? Here's one way pollsters make sense of the numbers"
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19. Dubai battles flood waters as historic storm causes chaos | FT
Featuring some typically exquisite animated maps from Steven Bernard.
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20. Exploring "The Simpsons" with DataWrapper for the 30DayChartChallenge 2024 | Cedric Scherer
Cedric is one of the co-hosts of the #30DayChartChallenge, "a data visualization challenge with the aim to create a data visualization on a certain topic for each day of April" and this is his collection of works. Loads of other people took part but I liked Cedric's self-imposed rules.
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21. A Huge Number of Homeowners Have Mortgage Rates Too Good to Give Up | The Upshot
"On a scale not seen in decades, many Americans are stuck in homes they would rather leave."
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22. 10 Years, 100 Stories: The Work That Defines the Upshot | The Upshot
"Ten years ago this week, The New York Times introduced the Upshot, a section devoted to explaining 'politics, policy and everyday life'.”
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Wonderful portfolio of work from Lorena Elebee, Senior Data and Graphics Visualization Journalist at Los Angeles Times
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"Hold the Line is a piece of sound art generated by data from Canada’s 2023 wildfire season."
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25. 30 años sin el genio del grunge, Kurt Cobain. | Alex Calderón on LinkedIn
I'm not a Spanish speaker but even I can work this one out. I was immediately drawn to the vibrancy and bravado of the layout of this graphic. Nicely done, Alex.
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Learning
Relevant articles, interviews, or videos to help further your development in data viz.
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Devin announcing a big functional update to VisPubs, an open access database of visualisation publications, which now enables filtering of publications by year, venue, awards, and resources.
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27. Visualization Through Interdisciplinary Creativity | Liuhuaying Yang & Paul Kahn on Nightingale
Long-time followers will know how much I like pieces like this that look at the different interdisciplinary capabilities required in dataviz, this is a really interesting article that picks up a similar theme about collaboration in datgaviz
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28. What is the shape of time | Francis Gagnon via Bluesky
I've paraphrased the title there but this is typically smart thread of thinking by Francis and his team to resolve the difficulty of designing a timeline where most things of importance happen within a tiny range of moments.
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"I’m often asked how long a project takes and what that process looks like. I usually give a vague answer... So this time, I kept a diary of what I did every single day I worked on this project."
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30. Sketching Sketchy Bar Charts | Effect & Affect
"People systematically misinterpret bar charts of averages. In a pair of clever drawing experiments, Wellesley researchers highlight three surprisingly common bar-driven fallacies."
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Really interesting piece about the idea of data that could exist but isn't collected and so feels 'lost'. I can't do it justice in a short intro so best you read Jon's piece.
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32. Color Jitter | Tyler Sloan for Nightingale
"Color Jitter: Using Randomness to Augment Categorical Visualizations"
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33. How we told the story of Japantown’s exile from San Francisco | San Francisco Chronicle
This is the companion process piece to the excellent visualisation project posted in item #1 above, by Sarah Feldberg...
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34. Cool Grey City of Data: inside the San Francisco Chronicle's data team | The Data Journalism Podcast
... and to top off this issue's SF Chronicle love-in, here's Simon Rogers and Alberto Cairo chat with Dan Kopf and Nami Sumida to discuss their approach to telling data stories
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35. 35+ data visualization tools that The Washington Post uses | Storybench
Perfectly slotted in as item #35, at this year’s NICAR conference in Baltimore The Washington Post "shared over 35 tools they have been using for building data visualizations"
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36. 60 Ways to Visualize Time Series Data in Tableau | VizWiz
"I don't believe in creating fancy visualization to get attention. I prefer easy to understand. Here's my complete list of 60 unique ways to visualize time series data." Where 'I' = Andy Kriebel.
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"How the field of product design lost its way — and how it can find its way back"
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News
Latest developments, announcements, or announcements affecting the data viz world.
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Registration is open for Outlier 2024 which is taking place in Chicago (as well as virtually) from 12-14 June. I loved attending the 2023 event in Porto and have also attended remotely in the past which worked really well.
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39. Canva Acquires Design Platform Affinity | Affinity
This feels quite a significant acquisition. I've been looking closely at Affinity, of late, as an alternative to Adobe CC which is becoming ever more bloated and far too AI-focussed. With Canva also the home of Flourish studio, which I've been using extensively recently, that offers a lot of dataviz, design, and publishing functionality under one roof.
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40. Jason Forrest Agency | Jason Forrest via Twitter
"I’m opening a new agency! Organized around a collective of the world’s best talent in data visualization, interactive software development and design, the Jason Forrest Agency is focused on solving complex problems in business and industry."
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41. Launching 'Data For India' | Rukmini Srinivas via Twitter
"After more than a year of work, we have now launched Data For India, a public platform that seeks to expand access to Indian data for everyone, and deepen the understanding of the country that can come from this data" (Thread)
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42. Interactive Data Visualisation with Svelte and D3 | Graphic Hunters via Bluesky
New course launched by Goof and to be delivered by the brilliant Matthias Stahl in Utrecht, NL over 1-2 July.
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Sundries
Additional references to pieces covering broader data, tech, or design matters.
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43. "Never change, South London" | Stu Royall via Twitter
Alex Selby-Boothroyd shared this, which is brilliant in and of itself but I also love the scatter-plot-ness of it and the sense of it almost looking like part of a scrollytelling story.
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"One Minute Park allows you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each. These are just one minute videos, not webcams. Eventually the project will fill in all the minutes (1440) in a day. You can create your own One Minute Park to help achieve this goal."
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46. South Korean Election Graphics | Michelle Ye Hee Lee via Twitter
"The best part of South Korean election night: the graphics."
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47. What is the Point of the EDETC (Everyday EveryThing Carry) Movement? | Core77
"When can we say that a product category has lost the plot, versus 'evolving?'... Thus we have objects like this Vault 2.0 carrying case, for when you want to tote 120-plus objects...'
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48. This brilliant painting shows a human aging as you walk past | @artistic_unity_ via Instagram
"Spanish artist Sergi Cadenas creates stunning paintings that transform as you move from one side to the other, showcasing the human aging process."
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49. This animated structure is made from wood and paper, and powered by sand | Its Nice That
"Pinaffo & Pluvinage have created a structure that doubles up as a dazzling art installation and technical design"
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50. ‘It should feel like an extension of the living room’ | The Guardian
"A ‘non-hierarchical’ university space that can be continually altered or even moved has won the EU’s biennial prize for contemporary architecture"
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Thanks for reading!
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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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Newsletter compiled and published by Andy Kirk on behalf of Visualising Data Ltd, 41 Talbot Road, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS8 1AG
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