Information is Beautiful

Best of the visualization web 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 January 2018. Visualisations & Infographics Includes static and interactive visualisation examples, infographics and galleries/collections of relevant imagery. SRF | 'Roger Federer: 20 Years, 20 Titles' Mapping Police Violence | '2017 Police Violence Report... collected data on over 1,100 killings by police in 2017.'

Open data hub launches to track global responses to COVID-19 Imperial College London has launched a new survey to track how populations are responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Led by the College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation and in partnership with YouGov, the survey will collect responses from 30,000 people from 29* countries every week. The data will be integrated with information about the government safety policies, COVID-19 cases and deaths in each country and shared freely with the public, researchers and policy-makers in anonymised form through an online hub. The project is exploring over time the public’s attitudes towards government COVID-19 safety measures. By generating and sharing one of the most comprehensive datasets of its kind, the work aims to facilitate a better understanding of the effectiveness of policies in curbing the spread of coronavirus and empower governments to plan their actions based on evidence. The first insights gathered from the data include:

Met Museum Open Access Makes 375,000 Pieces Available for Free Claude Monet, Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899) Renowned for its comprehensive collection of work that captures “5,000 years of art spanning all cultures and time periods,” New York City’s world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently announced that 375,000 of its pieces in the public domain are now available without restrictions. As an update to a similar 2014 initiative, the new policy, called Open Access, allows individuals to easily access the images and use them for “any purpose, including commercial and noncommercial use, free of charge and without requiring permission from the Museum.” The available works represent a wide range of movements, styles, and mediums, and span iconic paintings by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh to centuries-old costumes and armor. You can access the unrestricted images through the Met’s website.

Refreshed review of Outlinely — a new outliner for Mac [Due to the major hash I made of my previous review of Outlinely, I have decided to start over with a (mostly) new review.] Thanks to the eagle-eye of one of the folks over at outlinersoftware.com, I was recently made aware of a new outlining application for Mac known as Outlinely (requires OS 10.8 or higher). Aside from the name, there is a lot to like about this nifty little app. The introductory price of $5 makes it a real bargain. If this application were for Windows, it would instantly be one of the top outliners on that platform — which, admittedly, is more of a commentary of outliners for Windows than accolades for Outlinely. Nevertheless, Outlinely is equal parts slick and simple, and looks like a nice option for cranking out notes and gathering thoughts.

What is Visualization? A Definition What is a visualization? The word is problematic, and there have been very few definitions that try to define this field we are working in. More importantly: what is not a visualization? It is easy to argue that anything visual is a visualization in some way – but does that mean anything? Junk Charts This post is part 2 of an appreciation of the chart project by Google Newslab, advised by Alberto Cairo, on the gender and racial diversity of the newsroom. Part 1 can be read here. In the previous discussion, I left out the following scatter bubble plot.

amp.theguardian We knew this was coming. In her 1994 warning to the world, The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett concluded: “While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.” If you think her language hyperbolic, consider the more sober analysis from the US Institute of Medicine in 2004. It evaluated the lessons of the 2003 Sars outbreak, quoting Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply.

The Trump Resistance Plan: A Timeline – Russia and President Trump Of the Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, when Comey told Trump about the infamous Steele dossier, Trump said: “He shared it so that I would think he had it out there” as leverage against Trump. Of the Feb. 14, 2017, meeting, when Trump said he hoped Comey could see his way to “letting Flynn go,” Trump said: “He said I said ‘hope’ — ‘I hope you can treat Flynn good’ or something like that. I didn’t say anything. But even if he did — like I said at the news conference on the, you know, Rose Garden — even if I did, that’s not — other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying — they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: ‘It’s ended. It’s over. 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. While your grammar shouldn’t be a reflection of your creative powers or writing abilities, let’s face it — it usually is.

Data visualization books: How to start your personal library The Excel Charts Blog There are many approaches to data visualization. Take well-know authors like Tufte, Cleveland, Ware, Few, Bertin or McCandless. There is some overlap, but they all approach data visualization from a different angle. That’s great news for you: this means that you can come up with a unique point of view that reflects your interests and needs.

Visual Business Intelligence We typically think of quantitative scales as linear, with equal quantities from one labeled value to the next. For example, a quantitative scale ranging from 0 to 1000 might be subdivided into equal intervals of 100 each. Linear scales seem natural to us. Scientists have been sounding the alarm on coronavirus for months. Why did Britain fail to act? On 24 January, Chinese doctors and scientists reported the first description of a new disease caused by a novel coronavirus. They described how a strange series of cases of pneumonia had presented in December in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people and the capital of Hubei province. At that time, 800 cases of the new disease had been confirmed. The virus had already been exported to Thailand, Japan and South Korea.

9 of the Strangest and Loveliest Dioramas Ever While there are endless different kinds of dioramas, there is something that most all of them have in common: the strange beauty that comes from capturing our world in miniature, in exacting detail. Some of the most impressive examples of this craft are on display in museums around the globe, while others a bit more off the beaten path. From bizarre to beautiful, here are nine places to see these intricate three-dimensional snapshots of the world. Fisher Museum Forestry Dioramas Since 1907, Harvard University has managed 3,000 acres of woodlands in western Massachusetts that serve as the field lab and research center for the university’s graduate forestry program. And in the midst of this forest is the Fisher Museum, home to a series of beautifully realistic dioramas that tell the history of the forestry itself.

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