Nadja Popovich for the Guardian delves into America’s drug overdose epidemic, starting with an animated map that shows changes from 1999 to 2014.
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The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey run by the United States Census Bureau that collects data about who we are. The map maker bot by Neil Freeman is a Twitter bot that automatically generates county-level maps based on this ACS data. It’s been running for the past month, making one map per hour, so there are already lots of demographic breakdowns to browse.

Pretty awesome. The implementation gets extra plus points for making the maps straight out of a government pamphlet.

If you’re looking for a knowledge bomb during your lunch breaks, the OpenVis Conf talks from this year are all online. Naturally, you can sift through the talks with a visual interface that gives you a good idea of what each talk is about before you get into it. Nice.

If you think of network visualization as a collection of nodes and edges, you typically get a bunch of circles and lines that vary in width to represent volume or strength of connection. However, in this visualization, Fathom used dots to represent patients moving between different states of a health network. The more dots the more patients, or in terms of networks, the stronger the connections.

I don’t find the topic all that interesting, but the implementation is pretty sweet.

As we all know these days, there exists a gender pay gap across most major professions in the United States. The Wall Street Journal charts the average differences for 446 occupations.
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Quantified Selfie is a project to find narratives in an individual’s personal dataset. It’s not about optimization or self-improvement. It’s about facets of the everyday, which is my favorite kind of personal data collection. In the most recent addition, peek into a woman’s rocky move from San Francisco to New York, through the lens of her music listening habits over a year. [via Waxy]

Using motion capture methods, Tobias Gremmler collected movement data for two kung fu masters. Then he visualized the results with various interpretations, such as particles, fabric, and scaffolding. Pretty:

[via Colossal]

Sumo has a long history that goes back centuries. Unlike most things that old though, there are detailed records of tournaments and wrestlers, which allows a comparison over the years. Matthew Conlen for FiveThirtyEight charted them all in an interactive. Go through the explainer, and then use the last chart to look at the data by various dimensions.

See also the full article on sumo.

Last year Quartz announced Atlas, which was a place to find all of their charts. Now they’re slowly opening up their platform, namely the chart-making tool, so that others can make charts and share their own data.

Why might you want to create charts with Atlas? It’s a chance to use our widely acclaimed charting tool, which makes it easy to visualize data in a simple, consistent, and mobile-friendly style. Every chart published on Atlas has its own page. You and others can share the chart, embed it elsewhere, grab an image, or download the underlying data.

It should be interesting to see where this goes. It reminds me a lot of Swivel from back in 2010, and that one didn’t fare so well.

Global temperature is on the rise, as most of us know. Ed Hawkins charted it in this spiral edition of temperature over time.

Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) https://t.co/YETC5HkmTr pic.twitter.com/Ypci717AHq

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 9, 2016

See also the Bloomberg chart that uses a standard coordinate system but stacks lines on top of one another.

Emotions are complex and only partially understood, yet such a force in how we live our lives. The Atlas of Emotions, produced by Stamen Design, shows what we know about these things, based on research and conversations between the Dalai Lama and psychologists Paul and Eve Ekman.

Using a geographic metaphor, the interactive starts with five universal emotions or “continents”: Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, and Enjoyment. From there, you can see what states each puts you in and what actions come about.

But do I really have to say anything more than Dalai Lama? What.

See the project here and find more background on the atlas here.

There is visualization in practice and there is visualization in theory and research. Each should inform the other, but it typically doesn’t happen that way. Kennedy Elliot, a graphics editor at the Washington Post, provides a rundown of one branch from the research side of things: human perception. There are quite a few studies.

Despite what commentators and sports analysts might have you think, picking great players in a sports draft is full of uncertainty. A player might be great in college, but the skills might not transfer to the professional level. Someone might be decent in college but end up great later.

The Washington Post delves into the uncertainties throughout the history of the NFL (the United States’ professional football league). Select your team and see how they have fared over the years.

Thumbs up for the handwriting aesthetic used with the annotations.

The Traveling Salesman Problem is a popular puzzle that asks for the shortest route between a set of points such that you visit each point once and end up back where you started. The problem is trivial for a few points, but it gets tricky as you add more. Here are are a few of the strategies in action.

See also this interactive simulation.

Or, you can try using genetic algorithms. [via kottke]

The Year that Music Died from Polygraph is an animated timeline that shows the Billboard top 5 songs since 1956, all the while playing the top song during a given week.

The visualization itself is fairly straightforward, but I like how everything shifts so smoothly. Artist thumbnails move up and down matching their position on the music chart, the number one songs play without sounding jerky, and a counter on the right keeps track of total weeks at number one per artist. [via Waxy]