Every month I collect resources and tools to help you better visualize data. Here’s the good stuff for January 2020.

Flow Fields, a generative art tool by Michael Freeman, lets you adjust various parameters, such as color, smoothness, and fluctuations, and the flows just keep coming. Pretty.

The code is up on GitHub and is based on Daniel Shiffman’s Coding Train tutorials.

For ProPublica, Ellis Simani and Ken Schwencke compiled an interactive database that you can search:

ProPublica reporters spent months collecting the lists as they were originally released by each diocese. They then made them searchable via a public database in order to provide victims of clerical abuse and members of the public a way to search across all of the released lists.

More than 6,700 names are included in the database, and over 5,800 of them are unique. A little more than half of the people named were listed as being deceased. ProPublica did not have the data necessary to merge records with the same name across dioceses, though our reporting on specific clergy indicates that some have surfaced on as many as eight lists.

Unsettling.

The data is also available for download.

Noah Veltman just posted a dataset of 23,463 personalized license plate applications that were flagged for additional review by the state of California from 2015 to 2016. Casually scrolling through, for the plates people request and why they are flagged, this is a goldmine of amusement.

Veltman writes:

This data was parsed from a set of 458 Excel workbooks that the DMV prepared for someone else’s public records request. I received the files as a consolation prize in response to my own related records request, which I was told would cost $2,000 to fulfill otherwise.

Just on this information alone, I think we are obligated to do something with this dataset.

Sometimes illustrating scientific findings is a challenge. Sometimes the illustrations are published anyways, because there are no more options. Sometimes those illustrations end up on a Twitter feed called Science Diagrams that Look Like Shitposts.

Over a year ago, Google released Dataset Search in public beta. The goal was to index datasets across the internets to make them easier to find. It came out of beta:

Based on what we’ve learned from the early adopters of Dataset Search, we’ve added new features. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map. Plus, the product is now available on mobile and we’ve significantly improved the quality of dataset descriptions. One thing hasn’t changed however: anybody who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by using an open standard (schema.org) to describe the properties of their dataset on their own web page.

I haven’t tried it in a while, but the last time I did, there weren’t that many sources yet, because the indexing partially relies on others to use a standard to provide metadata. Kicking the tires on it now, it still kind of feels like an index of other dataset aggregators, but I’m interested.

Using one of my recent projects as an example, I describe my non-elegant process of making a quick chart.

So get this. There are these things called radio stations that broadcast music using frequency modulation. They call it “FM radio.” You don’t download or stream the music, and you don’t get to choose what songs you want to hear right away, but sometimes you can call locally and request a song you like. It’s also free to listen to if you have this thing called a “radio.” In exchange, you have to listen to “commercials” sometimes where someone tries to sell you stuff. Seems like a fair exchange.

Anyways, Erin Davis mapped these radio stations and their coverage, based on FCC data. She joined the data with radio-locator.com data, which provides music genre. This allowed for the splits above.

Technology is amazing.

File another one under the sounds-good-on-paper-but-really-challenging-in-practice. Kashmir Hill, for The New York Times, describes the challenges of new laws that allow users to request the data that companies collect on them:

Since then, two groups of researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to fool the systems created to comply with G.D.P.R. to get someone else’s personal information.

One of the researchers, James Pavur, 24, a doctoral student at Oxford University, filed data requests on behalf of his research partner and wife, Casey Knerr, at 150 companies using information that was easily found for her online, such as her mailing address, email address and phone number. To make the requests, he created an email address that was a variation on Ms. Knerr’s name. A quarter of the companies sent him her file.

“I got her Social Security number, high school grades, a good chunk of information about her credit card,” Mr. Pavur said. “A threat intelligence company sent me all her user names and passwords that had been leaked.”

Yay.

I’m not saying these new laws are bad, but maybe get yourself a good password manager and change all those duplicate passwords.

For The New York Times, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries looked at the current state of facial recognition in law enforcement:

Officials in Florida say that they query the system 4,600 times a month. But the technology is no magic bullet: Only a small percentage of the queries break open investigations of unknown suspects, the documents indicate. The tool has been effective with clear images — identifying recalcitrant detainees, people using fake IDs and photos from anonymous social media accounts — but when investigators have tried to put a name to a suspect glimpsed in grainy surveillance footage, it has produced significantly fewer results.

Not quite CSI levels yet, huh.

Following up on his mini-app to draw ridgeline maps for elevation, Andrei Kashcha made a tool to draw a streets map of anywhere in the world.

Enter a city, and using data from OpenStreetMap, you’ve got yourself a map for export. You can also easily change the color scheme to your liking, which is fun to play with as you scroll back and forth.

Finally, Kashcha also put the code up on GitHub.

For the Absurd America section of The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind: Are cows better represented in the Senate than people?

A 3-D rendered map of Australia depicting a month of bushfires grew popular last week. Some thought it misleading. Others thought it was okay. It’s probably somewhere in the middle of that.

The Washington Post asked Democratic candidates a series of policy questions. To see which one agrees with you most, the Post made a quiz:

Now, it’s your turn to answer. Below are 20 questions we found particularly interesting, mostly because they reveal big differences between the remaining major candidates. We haven’t asked the campaigns about every topic, but this selection tries to cover a variety of issues. Answer as many as you like.

It was also a good way to catch up on what candidates currently stand for. I’ve found it hard to keep up lately.

When I think government structure, I tend to think in general overviews where you have some branches that check and balance each other. But when you look closer, within organizations that make up the bureaucracy, you’ll find lots of variation. Peter Cook laid it out for the United Kingdom with org charts for each department.

And apparently org charts are also known as organograms? Where have I been on this one? [Thanks, Peter]

In 2007, Noah Kalina posted a time-lapse video showing a picture of himself every day for six years. Pop culture swallowed it up. There was even a Simpsons parody with Homer. After another six years, it was a video for twelve years’ worth of photos. Kalina has kept his everyday project going, and the above is the new time-lapse for two decades.

This brings back graduate school memories for me as I argued for personal data collection as a diary instead of just for quantified self. I often led with Kalina’s project as a primary example. He ages, his background changes, and his camera improves, but the angle stays the same.

It’s a very tiny window into his life, played out over time, but I bet for Kalina it means a bit more. [via kottke]

It’s difficult to emphasize how much life changes when a child comes into the picture. Caitlin Hudon made a chart to show how her daily schedule shifted dramatically.

For a while, it seems like all of your free time is gone for good, but ever so slowly, you get a little bit of it back as they grow more independent.