Throughout the month I collect new tools for data and visualization and additional resources on designing data graphics. Here’s the new stuff for January.

A wideout view of the news cycle can look like a series of rise and falls. Something captures the general public’s attention, and then it fades off. Thank you, next. This collaboration between Schema Design and Google Trends charts search volume for news stories and aligns them by their peaks, so that you can see these rise and falls.

Transparent areas overlaid on each other show an “average” trend, and the more irregular shapes are made obvious because they stand out from the rest.

See also the simpler view by Axios, who contributed stories to the project.

Matt Baker provides this nifty diagram on how the alphabet changed over the centuries, evolving to what it is now. Grab the print.

Cartoonist Olivia de Recat illustrated the closeness over time for various relationships. Charming. Unfortunately, the print is sold out. Sad trombone.

For The New York Times, Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma visualized the path to Congress for every member. See it all at once like above or search for specific members. The vertical scale represents previous categories of work and education and looks like it’s sorted by how common the categories were among Republicans and Democrats. The horizontal scale represents time, which starts at undergraduate and finishes at the House. Nice.

Seems about right.

Unfortunately, you can’t just conjure data out of thin air. Well, I guess you can, but it’d probably be sort of unreliable. Kind of. Maybe. So where do you find data? Here’s where I’m at in 2019.

Sarah Weber posted a picture of a scarf that her mom knit to represent rail delays. Weber’s mom knitted two rows per day and used color to indicate the delay. Grey was under 5 minutes, pink was 5 to 30 minutes, and red was over 30 minutes.

After getting some attention on the Twitters, the mom opted to put it up on eBay to benefit charity Bahnofs Mission. It went for $7,550 euros. Nice.

I’m always up for some scaled perspective. From David Packer:

Anyone need a video demonstrating 1000s, 100s, 10s and 1s? You're in luck pic.twitter.com/sMGKlXKVy7

— Dave (@sheepfilms) January 21, 2019

DataKind, the organization known for helping others use data for social good, received a $20 million grant from The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth:

The grant will allow DataKind to transition from a project to a platform-based model, thereby, supporting more organizations on a set of high impact areas, such as community health and inclusive growth. We’re humbled and honored that these two groups are supporting our mission with $20M over five years to help us grow to support the needs of the sector.

Awesome.

Some words are harder to spell than others, and on the internet, sometimes people indicate the difficulty by following their uncertainty with “(sp?)”. Colin Morris collected all the words in reddit threads with this uncertainty. Download the data on GitHub.

Hurry up, light. We’re gonna be late:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqFBbNtt9c” /]

By James O’Donoghue, the animation shows the speed of light in real-time. The distance between Earth, the moon, and Mars is to scale, but the locations are scaled up so that you can see them.

See also the animations for Earth to the moon and of light orbiting Earth.

Ah, the online personality quiz, oh how I missed you. Oh wait, this one is slightly different. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker and Julia Wolfe provide a quiz used by psychologists to gauge personality traits:

First, the Big Five doesn’t put people into neat personality “types,” because that’s not how personalities really work. Instead, the quiz gives you a score on five different traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, negative emotionality and openness to experience. For each of those traits, you’re graded on a scale from 0 to 100, depending on how strongly you associate with that trait. So, for example, this quiz won’t tell you whether you’re an extravert or an introvert — instead, it tells you your propensity toward extraversion. Every trait is graded on a spectrum, with a few people far out on the extremes and a lot of people in the middle.

Dang it. I really wanted to know what Harry Potter character I am.

Datawrapper is an online tool that helps you make nice-looking charts for the web. No code is required. Instead, a focused interface lets you load data, pick your chart type, refine, and publish.

John Nelson turned the Grand Canyon inside out to understand the magnitude better:

Some of my earliest memories of the place had to do with the trippy feeling of my eyes and mind trying to make sense of the scale. I had seen many mountain ranges and vistas, including some on the way, but the vast negative space played havoc with my perception of magnitude. I’ve felt it a few times since, but never like that first Grand Canyon overlook.

Instructions included on how to do this in ArcGIS Pro.

Digital assistants offer convenience, but they also offer continuous surveillance, and it’s not always clear when the tech is listening. Alias by Bjørn Karmann is a device you put on top of the assistant the block any unwanted listening:

Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant when placed on top of it. The speakers of Alias are used to interrupt the assistance with a constant low noise/sound that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant. First when Alias recognises the user created wake-word, it stops the noise and quietly activates the assistant with a sound recording of the original wake-word. From here the assistant can be used as normally.

Armed with a Raspberry Pi and a 3-D printer, follow the build guide to make your own.