Nathan Yau

One leaked file, the location of 12 million smartphones

Maps / Charlie Warzel, New York Times, privacy, Stuart A. Thompson

A file leaked to The New York Times contained location traces of 12…

Scripts from The Office, the dataset

Data Sources / R, scripts, The Office

The decade is almost done. You’re sitting there and you’re thinking: “I wish…

Making invisible gas leaks visible

Statistical Visualization / methane, New York Times, pollution

For The New York Times, Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi went to…

Arctic ice melting

Maps / Arctic, climate, ice, NASA

One way to gauge the amount of ice in the Arctic is to…

Analysis of online sermons

Statistics / Pew Research, religion, sermon, text

Pew Research Center analyzed online sermons in U.S. searches, taking a closer look…

Where Christmas trees come from

Maps / Christmas, Lauren Tierney, Tim Meko, trees, Washington Post

For The Washington Post, Tim Meko and Lauren Tierney:
Before the 1930s, Christmas…

Color breakdown of Scientific American covers

Statistical Visualization / color, covers, Scientific American

For Scientific American, Nicholas Rougeux and Jen Christiansen show the shift in hues…

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2019

Visualization / best-of

As I do every year, I picked my ten favorite visualization projects. Here they are in no particular order.

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Visualization Tools, Data, and Resources Roundup – December 2019 Roundup (The Process #69)

The Process / roundup

Every month I collect links to new tools, datasets, and visualization resources. Here’s the good stuff for December 2019 and the last roundup for the decade.

Best visual illusion of the year

Design / axes, illusion

Our brains are pretty good at finding patterns, but it has some blindspots…

How online school ratings are flawed

Infographics / ratings, school, Vox

Standardized ratings are a challenge, because they often try to encapsulate many variables…

Deaths from child abuse, a starting dataset

Data Sources / Boston Globe, children, deaths, ProPublica

By way of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, ProPublica and The…

Color palettes browsable in context

Apps / color

Color scheme selections are nice and all, but they’re even better when viewed…

Occupation Growth and Decline

Data Underload / work

We looked at shifts in job distribution over the past several decades, but it was difficult to see by how much each occupation group changed individually. This chart makes the changes more obvious.

Datawrapper updates pricing structure, do more for free

Apps / Datawrapper

Datawrapper, a focused web tool that makes online charts easier to put together…

Using old ship logs as a window into the weather in the 1800s

Maps / climate, Feilding Cage, Reuters, ships

For Reuters, Feilding Cage describes a weather time machine project by NOAA that…

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Moratorium On Bar Chart Races; When Impractical Visualization is More Practical (The Process #68)

The Process / bar chart race, novelty, Reddit

The dataisbeautiful subreddit announced a moratorium on the ever popular bar chart race. The frequency of submissions that used the method got out of hand and spam made it all the less savory. Still, the method holds value.