Data visualization

Data viz resources

• Data Viz Project: reference with all the possibilities sorted by input type, shape, etc.
• New R package "plotgardener": for making precise multi-panel figures — bioRxiv
• Plot Parade: cool-looking plots and inspiration for beautiful figures
• Data visualization: a view of every Points of View column — guidelines from Nature — Springer Nature Protocols & Methods
• R package ggVennDiagram: for intersecting up to 7 sets

Cool data viz examples

• COVID-19 deaths in the US — nice data viz — Vox
• Iceberger: "Draw an iceberg, and see how it will float."
• Cool projects by Shirley Wu
• Better ways to understand big numbers: whether that's the US budget or geological time scales — New York Times
• All the cool charts and graphs — Wait But Why
• Setosa: data viz explanations of math and probability concepts
• Topic modeling of text messages: exploring a relationship
• Word use in the Iliad
• What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?: cool data viz and analysis of how the meanings of Chinese names have changed over time, reflecting history — Isabella Chua, Kontinentalist
• A technique to extract and highlight motion in video: striking and surprisingly simple
• Neil Freeman's Fake is the New Real: clever, sometimes beautiful maps and lists derived from census data — favorite is "circled states," where a country's border is pushed out into a circle
• Taiwanese families have more pets than kids — creative depictions of aging populations
• A cool visual explainer from the NYT on how to get a restaurant reservation
• All the ships in the world, live
• Two maps, same scale
• Mapping America in 1,001 books — sorta like what I'm trying to do across the globe; a great idea for visualization I want to explore — Los Angeles Times
  • Yet another person on the book-per-country journey
• Building a scale model of the history of the universe in the Mojave Desert — worth the 10-minute watch for the impact, visuals, and overall coolness
• Ride this Space Elevator to understand the scale of Earth's atmosphere
• Cool site allowing you to split the US by population — highlights the crazy disparity in population density across the country

From The Pudding

• Guides by The Pudding on data analysis, design, and storytelling
• Top data viz of 2020: contact tracing, Ben & Jerry's, and more
• A People Map of the US: city names replaced by their most Wikipedia'd resident
• Another fascinating, smoothly-crafted visual essay by The Pudding, this time on the figures we find on banknotes across the world

Color palettes

• Reasonable Colors: accessible and scientifically-designed color sets
• R: colorspace

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Data science

Data science resources

• HarvardX Biomedical Data Science Open Online Training — EdX course
• Mapping the deforestation footprint of nations reveals growing threat to tropical forests: combining several data sources to quantify and map global deforestation footprints of countries, linking deforestation patterns to international trade and global supply chains — Nguyen Tien Hoang and Keiichiro Kanemoto, Nature
• Degrees of uncertainty: an animated documentary about climate science, uncertainty, and knowing when to trust the experts — and how to balance the latter two, given that science is built on healthy skepticism; also on how imagination is a critical part of the scientific method — Neil Halloran
• Philanthropy and COVID-19: measuring one year of giving: MacKenzie Scott is responsible for over 40% of all COVID-giving; recommendations: give unrestricted grants, target marginalized communities, support operational and administrative costs — Candid
• The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere: new research shows that California's climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren't achieving real carbon savings — but companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway — Lisa Song and James Temple, ProPublica
• Satellite night-lighting data vs. GDP: "in autocratic countries like China, there's a much steeper relationship between night lights and GDP... his measure suggests that China's GDP is about 12% lower than the official number" — Martinez (2018) via Noah Smith
• How a gambler beat roulette — spoiler, it's because of imperfect wheels

Related

• Living in Data — Jer Thorp