Nathan Yau

The Natural Language Toolkit is a Python library that is commonly used to extract data from text. There’s a free, online-accessible book to learn how to use it.

Along the same lines as their NFL fan maps, Facebook had a closer…

Ph.D. students rethink the tenure track. The traditional approach is to get your degree and then look for a professor job. That’s changing though, and more people leave academia after they graduate. I think when I first got into graduate school academia was top on my list, too, but after working with my adviser and other professors, it didn’t seem like a job I’d enjoy.

Mapping Blank Spots in the Cheeseboard Maze. “IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari together with collaborators has succeeded in uncovering processes in which the formation of spatial memory is manifested in a map representation.”

It’s hard to know the impact of drone attacks as outsiders looking in,…

As the publication of Data Points nears, I’m excited to hold it in…

Math professor Jeff Bergen explains the odds of picking a perfect bracket.…

Science graphics editor Jonathan Corum of The New York Times is great at distilling complex ideas for a wide audience. He gave a talk at Tapestry a while back. He also recently put up his deleted slides.

On Kickstarter: A project that uses a visualization of pi to connect Brooklyn…

Upon discovering hundreds of thousands open embedded devices on the Internet, an anonymous…

We’ve Reached Peak Infographic, and We’re No Smarter for It. Add another to the list of people who are tired of infographics that don’t say much. Again though, it’s best not to get too bent out of shape over low-quality work, and energy is much better spent working on things that shine.

Do singer-songwriters age well like a fine wine, or does quality decline with…

If you listen to the radio long enough, you’ve probably noticed that many…

Emily Underwood on new cartographers and the growing field:
Geographers have traditionally studied…

Jessica Hagy, the one who made Venn diagrams on index cards popular, has…

It wasn’t long ago that sensors and personal tracking seemed like pure nerdery.…

Each year, Oscar speeches seem to follow a similar format, with familiar names…

Geo Point Plotter by Derek Watkins is a quick and dirty mapper. Copy and paste latitude and longitude coordinates, and you get a simple map with dots on it.

John Snow’s Cholera data in more formats. Includes death locations, pump locations, the original map, and Ordinance Survey maps. This could be useful for a class or if you want to kick the tires on some mapping software.

In a collaboration between PEER 1 Hosting, Steamclock Software, and Jeff Johnston, the…