Ukranian band Obiymy Doschu released a new song Razom. “It’s a uplifting and tender song about being afraid of your own hapiness and holding your feelings inside, and that sometimes just a little step in the direction of a loved one will help you find yourself again.” Sounds good to me.

The lead singer is also an engineer at Mapbox, and he made a visualization to accompany a song. Each circle represents a musician, and they size based on the person’s prominence during the song.

Calming.

Choropleth maps, the ones where regions are filled with colors based on data, grow easier to make. However, choosing colors, the number of colors, and the breakpoints is often less straightforward, because the answer is always context-specific. Lisa Charlotte Rost, now at Datawrapper, provides a rundown of the decision process.

The explanation is in the context of the Datawrapper tool, but you can easily apply the logic to your own workflow.

Researchers from NVIDIA published work with artificial intelligence algorithms, or more specifically, generative adversarial networks, to produce celebrity faces in high detail. Watch the results below.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxPcy5Gr4″ /]

Nutty.

Hierarchical models, or multilevel models, are used to represent data that might vary on, you guessed, different levels. Michael Freeman, from the University of Washington Information School, provides an introduction to the method using a scrolling format. The transitions give a good sense of how the model can change, depending on your approach.

As the list of sexual assault allegations grows for Harvey Weinstein (and many others who abused their power), Axios charted the time between events and public allegations. Painful decades.

With data visualization, you start with the data and let it guide geometry, colors, etc, and from there, you work on aesthetics, readability, and usability. The data informs the design. Project Lincoln is an experiment from Adobe that flips this. You draw shapes and illustrations first and then bind data to them.

Here it is in action:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX1BBMyY1bc” /]

My brain was confused. Something about this order of things doesn’t feel right. You go in with design first and then bring in the data, and then you edit again? Maybe this would be useful for quick prototypes or visual experiments? It’s hard to say how this would go in practice without actually trying it out, but my gut says no.

ProPublica runs a small annual workshop to teach journalists a bit about data and how it can be used to report. The training materials and some of the lectures are online now.

Though more than a thousand people have applied to ProPublica’s Data Institute, we’ve only been able to accept about 24 in the two years it’s been running. Faced with such a high demand, we’ve looked for ways to help more journalists trying to learn data journalism and interactive database design. In past years, we’ve put our slides and homework assignments online (here’s 2016 and 2017 ), but we also know how valuable it is to be able to see and hear what’s happening in the classroom.

I bet you woke up this morning thinking, “I haven’t seen a good visualization of sorting algorithms in at least a week. I wish someone would get on that.” Well here you go. Wish granted.

See also sorting algorithms explained with dance, books, and sound. And while we’re at it, don’t forget Mike Bostock’s visual essay on visualizing algorithms.

[Thanks @SimStolz]

Add another chart to the genre of heart rate during a significant event. Reddit user failian had an Apple Watch on when he was laid off, so he exported his heart rate data for the day and made this graph.

See also heart rates for a marriage proposal and during sex.

[arve url=”https://vimeo.com/218527594″ /]

Don Ingber and Charles Reilly of the Wyss Institute used data at the atomic level to visualize the simulation of sperm fertilizing an egg. The researchers used a Star Wars theme.

To see if entertainment could offer a solution to this challenge, Ingber teamed up with Charles Reilly, Ph.D., a molecular biophysicist, professional animator, and Staff Scientist at the Wyss Institute who previously worked at movie director Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post film studio, to create a film that would capture viewers’ imaginations by telling the story of a biological process that was accurate down to the atomic level.

Ingber notes a concern that non-scientists have grown skeptical of science. I’m not sure entertainment in this form is the way to fix that, but at least it was fun to watch. [via Co.Design]

I used to manually select my color schemes with trial and error, but these days, there are a lot of tools to help you pick colors for your charts. The motivation for most of them is to help you visualize your data in a way that is perceptually correct. That is, perceived differences translated between your eyeballs and your brain match the actual quantitative differences.

While there are new tools released fairly often, I tend to stick to these four simple and quick ones. Here they are by purpose.
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Picking colors is one my favorite things to do with visualization when I’m not in a rush for time. But when I can spare the minutes to pick and choose, it’s useful to have a quick reference. ColorBrewer is the go-to, but CARTOColors is a simpler take. It just shows you a bunch of schemes at once for sequential, diverging, and qualitative data. [via @maartenzam]

Cartographer Geraldine Sarmiento from Mapzen explores the drawing forms in cartography, such as lines, bridges, and buildings.

What is the visual language of cartography? Let’s explore this question through the medium of drawing. After all, it is this abstract representation of place onto a surface of fewer dimensions that the act of cartography entails.

Be sure to check out the Morphology tool to poke at the forms yourself.

Gallup surveyed Americans about their well-being across various factors. National Geographic gets into some of the geographic breakdowns.

While Gallup’s survey doesn’t attempt to explain why individuals feel the way they do, it does expose some commonalities among the lives of Americans. Respondents from the lowest ranked states were more likely to report worse physical and financial health: They were more likely to smoke, be obese, and have little interest in life. They also reported not having enough money to buy food or healthcare.

You can grab the data from the Gallup site here.

If a news organization wants to talk about the world in a fair way, it needs points of view from a group of people who are representative of said world. Otherwise, bias comes to play no matter how hard you try. Google Trends looks at the how different groups are represented in major news organizations across the country.