Different species of birds make different sounds. However, the sounds are so quick and compressed that it can be tough to pick out what is what. So Kyle McDonald, Manny Tan, and Yotam Mann created a “fingerprint” for each bird song and used machine learning to classify. Through the visual browser, you can play sounds and search for bird types. Similar sounds are closer to each other.

In the latest addition to the put-big-numbers-in-context genre, here’s the history timeline of our planet in the context of 100 yards.

What started as a personal project and then turned into a book, Dear Data was a collaboration between pen pals through data. Now Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s work is headed to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

[O]ur 104 original postcards and the many sketchbooks we filled with intermediate data drawings every week have found the best possible home for years to come. They will live in the archives and catalogue of one of the world’s most prestigious institution (well, we think so, at least!), humbled by being in the presence of the dazzling company of the great masters of art of the past two centuries.

This is amazing. Congratulations to Giorgia and Stefanie.

A hundred bucks in one state doesn’t always get you the same thing in another. Using calculations by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here’s a state map from The New York Times that shows the relative purchasing power in each state.

To better understand, imagine a store offering a range of goods and services, each for sale at the national-average price for that particular item. Now, imagine a shopping cart filled with $100 worth of items from that store.

In Hawaii, $100 buys about 85 percent of the goods in the cart thanks to the high prices there. In other words, $100 in Hawaii feels more like $85.60, compared to the national average.

In Mississippi, the opposite is true. With $100, you would be able to buy the cart’s contents and more: the equivalent of $115.30 of goods and services from the national-average store.

You can grab the data over at the BEA site.

In 2013, Josh Katz put together a dialect quiz that showed where people talk like you, based on your own vocabulary. Things like coke versus soda. It’s a fine example of how we’re often talking about the same thing but say or express it differently. Speaking American is the book version of the dialect quiz results.

It’s a fun coffee/kitchen table book to flip through casually. It’s not just a book maps. It’s a highlight of the interesting bits and provides some short explanations for why the differences exist. I’ve been enjoying bits and pieces on the occasion my son takes an unreasonable amount of time to finish his dinner.

Get it on Amazon.

D3.js, or Data-Driven Documents, version 4.0 was released a few months ago, so Jim Vallandingham updated his tutorial for categorized bubble charts to use the new version of the library. I’ve been slow getting to the new d3.js, but maybe this’ll move things along.

This is neat. A Google Arts & Culture Experiment, X Degrees of Separation shows a path of visual connections between two art pieces of your choosing. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but with art, computer vision, and machine learning.

In an effort to get people more interested in and to learn about artificial intelligence, Google just launched A.I. Experiments to showcase the technology in fun ways.

With all the exciting A.I. stuff happening, there are lots of people eager to start tinkering with machine learning technology. A.I. Experiments is a showcase for simple experiments that let anyone play with this technology in hands-on ways, through pictures, drawings, language, music, and more.

You can also download the code for each project and have a go yourself.

John Nelson has a knack for making maps that glow, where the base map serves as a dark backdrop and the data of interest sort of lights up. In a recent talk, he calls it Firefly Cartography and explains its use in presentation and in education.

A firefly map is to regular thematic maps the way that a lightsaber is to swords. Thematic layers that look like they are etched with white hot plasma tend to draw eyeballs and provide a sense of intensity that solid Boolean symbology just doesn’t offer. I think we are wired to notice and note things that glow. Whether it is marking time by the sun or moon, staring into embers, watching for nighttime travelers by the open flame they carry, or noting the churned phosphorescence of the sea, we historically have done well to note the things that glow.

I suspect firefly charts would be equally expressive.

During the election, The New York Times showed a live gauge to show the current forecast for Clinton and Trump. It moved to show a 25th to 75th percentile band of uncertainty:

A lot of people didn’t get it, and it seemed to upset plenty of people too. Gregor Aisch, an NYT graphics editor, explains what they tried to accomplish with the gauges.
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Default color schemes are often horrible, but spending a lot of time putting together color schemes when you don’t have a lot of minutes is also horrible. I Want Hue by Mathieu Jacomy at the Sciences-Po Medialab lets you set a few options, and it spits out a palette for your visualization.

Data Sketches, a collaboration between Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu, aims to visualize a monthly topic in two different ways.

Each month, we choose a topic and aim to have a visualization completed by the end of the month. Within the topic, we’re free to do whatever we want; a perfect opportunity to create, experiment, and have fun. The collaboration also gives us an encouraging sounding board, and a motivating pressure: a mutual reluctance of letting the other down.

They’re four months into the project with some fun results, and it’s a good example of how similar things can be shown in very different ways.

This is some fine map work by Lazaro Gamio and Dan Keating for the Washington Post. It shows total votes and margin of victory for each county with a peaks and valleys metaphor. Taller means more votes, and wider means greater margin. The Post rotated the United States map so that the east coast is on top and the west coast is on the bottom, which allows for scrollability and provides more space horizontally to show margins.

Nice.

A group of researchers wondered if there was a trend or predictability for when a scientist’s most impactful work came about. It’s random.
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Here we go.

In case you didn’t get the memo, pattern fills are back and so hot right now. In the category of new-to-me, Textures.js by Riccardo Scalco is a JavaScript library that makes adding lines and dots in place of boring solid colors a trivial task.