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 September.

As always, I hope you continue to find this newsletter useful, whether you are working on a dataviz, working in dataviz, or working to get working in dataviz. I'm running this newsletter as an experiment for 12 months to see how it lands and will then decide whether to continue doing investing the time and effort into maintaining it.

To catch up on all previous monthly issues visit my 'Newsletter' page.

See you next month, with the next issue due on Tuesday 26th November.

Andy

ps. My apologies for this month's issue being more than a week later to post. It has been a seriously busy couple of months, not helped by two periods of heavy colds picked up on work travels, and made slightly more hectic than normal by one of the 'my news' items below...

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. How Migration in Key States Affects Local Economics | Bloomberg (£)​

Loads of design elegance and little-detail excellence in this piece looking at how migrants in key US election swing states are settling in blue counties that saw GDP growth, while fewer settle in red counties that need workers to bolster their economies.

6. Seas of change: Tangible data visualization | Animesh Bajia on Behance​

A lovely design project and process narrative about a visualisation that responds to the brief of seeking to portray one of the Sustainable Development Goals using physical representations.

7. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time | Kasia Gasiewska on Tableau Public​

"Dive into the music ranking of the finest music albums in history, compiled by the Rolling Stone magazine" in this incredibly conceived and executed design

8. Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. | The Pudding​

"Help us document the stories behind the 59,507 outdoor courts in America."

9. Siberia to Brazil, Climate-Fueled Wildfires Move Underground | Bloomberg (£)​

"Wildfires are moving below ground where they smolder and emit massive amounts of pollution. They’re also triggering dangerous feedback loops."

10. Buildings wrapped in solid gasoline | Reuters​

Breathtaking visuals, illustrations, animations, and videos in this work that "Explores why buildings are still wrapped in 'solid gasoline' years after the London Grenfell Tower tragedy."

11. Talk Data Podcast to Me | Kevin Wee on Tableau Public​

"Believe it or not, learning about data practices does not always have to involve our eyes! I often do so by listening to podcasts while commuting, cooking, or exercising. Here, I introduce the top 12 data podcast channels I follow closely and the episodes released since 2020"

12. 5 Days With Elon Musk on X: Deepfakes, Falsehoods and Lots of Memes | New York Times (£)​

"Almost a third of 171 posts last week from the X owner were false, misleading or missing vital context."

13. Dublin Bay | Kerrie O'Leary​

"Dublin Bay is a visualisation of the effortless distribution of water during the 6 hour tidal period. Using tidal charts from the Dublin Bay where The River Liffey meets the Irish Sea, the installation uses a system of pulleys and weights inspired by the historical methods of tidal measurement to recreate its current behaviour. "

14. Coal generation in OECD countries falls below half of its peak | Ember​

The folks at Ember are doing some exceptional visuals and storytelling work right now and this piece is a great showcase of that.

15. Grocery chains are bigger than ever. See who runs the stores near you. | Washington Post (£)​

Such a brilliant centre-piece interactive map as well as extremely smart data work behind the scenes.

16. Visualising joint pain | Sonja Kuijpers on Bluesky​

"Like a true self reporting data illustrator I started tracking the pain in the joints of my hands. I am looking for a relation between my perimenopause/fluctuation in hormones and possible arthritis or arthrosis."(Obviously not at all nice that Sonja has to produce this but what a brilliant way to show it)

17. Inside the Supertall Building Boom | The Economist (£)t​

Great chart, lovely illustrations, and stunning photography

18. Remigration: How a White Nationalist Threat Spread from Austria to the US | Bloomberg (£)​

"A White nationalist idea is putting xenophobia on the ballot, an analysis of 3.1 million social media posts shows."

19. The Carrington Event | Miriam Quick on LinkedIn​

"New Loud Numbers project! The Carrington Event is a music track driven by data on the 1859 solar storm of the same name, the strongest geomagnetic storm ever recorded."

20. Where floods from Hurricane Helene are ravaging the North Carolina mountains | Washington Post (£)​

"Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina, impacting Asheville and Buncombe County."

21. Fernando Becerra​

Incredible portfolio of work from Fernando "an astrophysicist turned data analyst and data visualization developer"

Learning

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

25. Mapping the most popular National Park Service lands | Lauren Tierney for Esri​

Here's how Lauren made a map of the most visited National Park Service lands, with design inspired by a 1910 map brochure.

26. Rainbow Colormaps Are Not All Bad | IEEE Xplore​

From June 2023, this paper by Colin Ware, Maureen Stone and Danielle Albers Szafir offers some valuable nuance to the ideas and established practices that emerged from a paper published in 2007 titled 'Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful (by Borland and Taylor)'.

27. How we made 'Waves of Interest' | Moritz Stefaner, Destry Maria Sibley and Philippe Rivière on ObservableHQ​

A detailed design process narrative, from 2020, of the earlier project that underpinned and preceded the 'Waves of Interest' project linked at the top of this list.

28. Expert handling of multiple dimensions of data | JunkCharts​

Included for the piece itself but, almost above that, for the benefit of reminding some readers and introducing to new ones the prolific excellence of Kaiser Fung's posts dissecting the strengths and weaknesses of different visualisations.

29. Avoiding the demise of intention | Alberto Cairo's The Art of Insight​

"A few thoughts about generative A.I., visualization—and Michel Foucault"

30. How to make a firefly map with QGIS | Helen McKenzie on Medium​

"Firefly maps are a type of map in which the data appears to be glowing. Typically, these maps feature a dark basemap with light, glowing features overlaid. They’re a great way of communicating density, intensity and — well — they’re just damn sexy."

31. Raising relief maps from a line chart | Jack Goodall on Datawrapper​

"Datawrapper offers lots of great mapmaking options — but this week I want to try making maps using our line charts, something they definitely weren’t intended for."

32. Making Space Data Easier to Use: Overcoming Challenges and Expanding Access | Rob Simmon on Medium​

"In this essay I’ll describe the obstacles I see currently inhibiting the widespread use of remote sensing data, and outline some solutions that I think would help expand use of these datasets, especially for people outside the established research community."

33. Add Multiple Maps to One Layout | John Nelson Maps on Youtube​

"I sometimes get requests to show how to make a layout with multiple maps in it, like those Alaska and Hawaii insets, or and overview or a small multiple-layout with lots of little maps in it. Here's a thing about that using ArcGIS Pro."

34. Sankey Bump Chart in R with ggplot2 and ggsankey | R-graph Gallery​

"This post explains how to create a Sankey bump chart in R to visualize the genre distribution of summer movies over decades using ggplot2 and ggsankey. The chart highlights specific genres and adds labels to show genre counts."

35. Cleared by Fire | Apple Podcasts​

"For the past year, the Interactives Department at The New Yorker has been working alongside 'In the Dark' podcast on a remarkable visual exploration of what happened that day in Haditha. Sam Wolson, who co-directed the project, joins the podcast to talk about 'Cleared by Fire'."

36. Good Morning Data #5 | The Half-Full Learning Curve | Nightingale​

"Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the endless skills to master in data visualization? Julie reflects on the relentless pursuit of knowledge and the realization that we might already be enough."

News

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

39. CASA Alumnus Julian Hoffmann Anton Honoured with the Freedom of the City of London | UCL​

Huge congratulations to Julian for this recognition for his contributions to the field of data visualisation.

40. Wake Up Dataviz​

Always exciting to see people launch new versions of their website and this is Marthe Viallet's.

41. 'Getting (more out of) Graphics' | Taylor & Francis​

New book from Tony Unwin, Professor at University of Augsburg, "Getting (more out of) Graphics: Practice and Principles of Data Visualisation" from CRC Press.

42. 'Iconic Transit Maps: The World's Best Designs' | Prestel Publishing​

New book from Mark Ovenden, author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, "Iconic Transit Maps: The World's Best Designs" from Penguin Random House.

43. 'Dieses Kleine Buch' | @uclab_potsdam on Twitter​

"The new edition of 'DiesesKleineBuch' - visual grammar for German, by Barbara Avila Vissirini -has adjusted colors to avoid red-green perception issues and a new version with English descriptions"

Sundries

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

45. Drone Awards 2024 – in pictures | The Guardian​

"A selection of the nominated images from this year’s Drone Awards as part of the Siena World Photography Awards ceremony in Italy"

46. Your Name in Landsat | NASA​

Another fun project where you can enter your name to see it spelled in letters formed of Landsat earth imagery

47. How data departments have evolved and spread across English football clubs | The Athletic (£)​

"The football analytics world has grown hugely in recent years, but there has rarely been an objective, statistically-led depiction of the data ecosystems in clubs in English football." Until now...

48. ‘There’s otter poo, dragon poo …’ The woman who can make you smell everything, from hell to your grandparents | The Guardian​

"Scent designer Tasha Marks reveals the tricks of her trade"

49. BBC Sound Effects | BBC​

The BBC sound effects library, containing 33,066 records, is now completely free to access.

50. Melody Visualization Experiment | Polyfjord on Youtube​

A music viz experiment (based on the Tetris theme) where each bouncing object is synced to a respective musical note.

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 three-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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