Every month, I collect visualization tools and resources that might help you make better charts. Here’s the good stuff for April.

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The Vocal Synthesis channel on YouTube trains text-to-speech models using publicly available celebrity voices. Then using this new computer-generated voice, the celebrities “recite” various scripts. For example, the above is Jay-Z rapping the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, but it’s not him.

Find out more about the voice generation here, which was developed in 2017. Maybe more interesting, Jay-Z recently filed a copyright claim against the videos.

Many brands that were at-risk before the pandemic or ran with low profit margins might not make it through this thing. The Washington Post used a faux mall map to show the levels of risk:

Companies in this faux mall are rated as speculative investments at Moody’s and S&P as of April 13. These stores are already in financial trouble, and may not be able to access government stimulus money. The stores with the worst ratings are closer to the top of the mall. Brands that are part of the same company, like the Gap and Old Navy, are included in the same storefront.

The above is one level out of four, and each rectangle is sized by a company’s revenue.

I’m getting childhood flashbacks passing time inside the circles of clothes.

The New York Times went through the words used during press briefings, pulling out five main categories and highlighting one in particular:

Viewed simply as a pattern of Mr. Trump’s speech, the self-aggrandizement is singular for an American leader. But his approach is even more extraordinary because he is taking credit and demanding affirmation while he asks people to look beyond themselves and bear considerable hardship to help slow the spread of the virus.

Hm.

We cannot know the true number of coronavirus-related deaths. Maybe it’s because of a lack of tests. Maybe cause of death is ambiguous because of pre-existing conditions. So, for a different point of view, you might compare the usual number of deaths against total deaths. The Washington Post and researchers from the Yale School of Public Health looked at the differences.

See also a similar comparison for other countries by The New York Times.

As you would imagine, what we search for online shifted over the past few months. The unknowns push information gathering. Schema Design, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative and Axios, broke down the main changes in search since January.

Using a beeswarm chart, each circle represents a query and the size of a circle represents the rank in a query. I really wanted to mouse over the circles to see specifics, but maybe that would’ve been too much information in one view.

Hayleigh Moore for the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland on visualization and the pandemic:

With new updates developing by the hour amidst the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, trying to grapple at the most relevant information can be overwhelming. Data visualization has helped to synthesize this complex phenomena and shape the timeline of the Coronavirus pandemic that has drastically changed how we go about our daily lives. While commonly used to communicate data to the general population, visualization is now having quite a real-world impact in the face of this crisis.

Visualization the field often struggles with real-world examples for how its work plays a role in people’s lives. There should be no questions about that now.

If you have a room of monkeys hitting keys on typewriters for an infinite amount of time, do you eventually end up with a Shakespeare play? For The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg and Amber Thomas put the infinite monkey theorem to the test directing the computer to randomly generate musical note patterns to match classic songs.

All said and done, the point here isn’t the real numbers, but the faith that given enough time, randomness will prevail. Will our experiment eventually play even the simple Nokia ringtone in our lifetime? Almost certainly not. Given enough time would it? Almost surely.

The experiment has been running for 10 days so far, currently working on “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.

There’s a new tool-agnostic course now available for members. Check it out now.

Vi Hart, along with a group of experts from different political backgrounds and fields, proposes a plan for how we reopen:

People of the Pandemic is a game that lets you choose how many times you leave the house to get food or go for a walk. Using data for population and hospital beds in your ZIP code, the game then simulates infection, death, and recovery for a hypothetical virus, based on your choices and 19 others’ choices who played before you.

The infection rate felt aggressive no matter what choices I made in my ZIP code, so it’s probably worth emphasizing again that the game uses a simplified model. See the methodology here. But I like the effort to localize our individual decisions.

The daily counts for coronavirus deaths rely on reporting, testing, and available estimates, which means the numbers we see are probably lower than the real counts. So, for The New York Times, Jin Wu and Allison McCann plotted overall deaths against historical averages for a better sense of what’s really happening.

The contrasting red lines provide an obvious figure against the “would have died anyways” argument.

The coronavirus changed what information we search for. Has anyone been more interested in making masks or hand sanitizer in the history of the world? For The Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers compares search rankings for how, where, what, and how the week of April 5 to 11, for 2019 against 2020.

For many, sheltering in place means sheltering in relatively small places. Reuters zoomed in on the tight quarters in Tokyo, Japan. Not much room for movement.

The data might exist on a single page or in a single file, but there’s always more to it. Take a step outside for a better view.

Manuel Lima hosted a free online panel with Michale Friendly and Sandra Rendgen historical data visualization. It already happened, but you can listen to the archived version:

Human beings have been involved in the visual representation of information for thousands of years. While some books on Data Visualization go as far back as the 18th century, to what’s considered to be the golden age of information graphics, the history of the practice is much deeper. The participants on this panel have spent years exploring key characters and major contributions to the field of Data Visualization over many centuries. We will be discussing ancient visual metaphors, the challenges of doing research in this area, what we can learn from the past, and many other topics.

BTS, the South Korean boy band, is apparently really good at dancing. Ketchup Duck breaks down a routine into individual formations to show the precision:

There are a lot of impressive things about their dance routine, but the most impressive thing, to me, is how seamlessly they move around each other. As Lainey put it, it is art “the way they move so quickly, shifting from position to position, always aware of where they all are, taking space for themselves and creating space for each other.”

There’s a rabbit hole begging to be explored here. [via @Caged]