In a collaboration between the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and Stamen Design, American Panorama combines United States history, geographic mapping, and individual narratives to create a visual atlas of history.

They currently cover four topics — forced migration of enslaved people, overland trails, foreign-born population, and canals — with one map and chart interface for each. Each also uses a time component that lets you see changes by year. The first two are the most interesting though. They couple geographic data with personal stories that lend an important context, which tends to get lost as with time.

There isn’t a complete government record for people killed by police, which is why efforts such as the Guardian’s The Counted project exists. Mapping Police Violence is another source to look at, and they have a dataset for download for shootings from 2013 to present.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. The most liberal estimates project the total number of people killed by police in the U.S. to be about 1,200-1,300 per year. And while there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database, these estimates suggest that our database captures at least 90-98 percent of all police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.

The data includes each victim’s name, location, race, agency responsible, news source, and more.

Joshua Kunst did a quick analysis on tag usage on StackOverflow, the question and answer site for programming. The R tag isn’t the top of course, but it is growing in usage the quickest, based on slope.

This is good news for two reasons. The first of course is that R usage is growing. The second is that we can spend less time in archived R email threads, which tend to be a bit salty. Bonus: fewer people post questions to the threads, so fewer people will feel the need to respond. Win-win. [via Revolutions]

Jan Willem Tulp, in collaboration with Visualized, shows all known exoplanets (currently 1,942 of them) and then filters down to the ones that are habitable.

Astrobiology uses the Goldilocks principle in the argument that a planet must neither be too far away from, nor too close to a star to support life; either extreme would result in a planet incapable of supporting life. Such a planet is colloquially called a “Goldilocks Planet”.

Sweet wiggles and chart transitions.

The Online Star Register takes you through a delightful view of a million stars. You can browse and gaze the sky, but be sure to “take a tour” via the button on the top. It starts on the ground at Earth, beams you out far out and then back again.

Remember when xkcd charted character interactions for fictional stories? Inspired by that and the upcoming Star Wars movie, Katie Franklin, Simon Elvery and Ben Spraggon made interaction charts for every episode of the galactic space opera.

The one above is for Return of the Jedi. The horizontal axis represents time, and each line represents a character. The vertical bars show when the corresponding characters appear together.

Mathematician Katie Steckles shows logical solutions to wrapping variously shaped presents.

I could’ve used this a few days ago. At some point in the wrapping process I wondered if it’d be better if I just haphazardly threw a bunch of paper scraps onto the gift and covered it in tape.

Take all the guesswork out of finding “love” on Tinder, and let the True Love Tinder Robot by Nicole He swipe for you. Sensors measure your palm sweat and the robotic hand acts accordingly.

The True Love Tinder Robot will find you love, guaranteed. With Tinder open, you put your phone down front of the robot hand. Then you place your own human hands on the sensors. As you are looking at each Tinder profile, the robot will read your true heart’s desire through the sensors and decide whether or not you are a good match with that person based on how your body reacts. If it determines that you’re attracted to that person, it will swipe right. If not, it will swipe left. Throughout the process, it will make commentary on your involuntary decisions.

Enter the real world of data and statistics, and you find that files aren’t always neatly wrapped with a bow and delimited fields. Christopher Groskopf, who recently joined Quartz, provides an “exhaustive reference” to deal with the real stuff.

Most of these problems can be solved. Some of them can’t be solved and that means you should not use the data. Others can’t be solved, but with precautions you can continue using the data. In order to allow for these ambiguities, this guide is organized by who is best equipped to solve the problem: you, your source, an expert, etc. In the description of each problem you may also find suggestions for what to do if that person can’t help you.

The guide is aimed at journalists but easily applies to general data meanderings. I think we can all easily relate to problems such as missing data (“Where did the rest go?”), sample bias (“The population is who?”), and data in a difficult-to-manage format (“They gave you how many PDF files?”).

Bookmark it, read it, and keep it in your digital pocket.

As the saying goes, “All roads lead to Rome.” Folks at the moovel lab were curious about how true this statement is, so they tested it out. They laid a grid on top of Europe, and then algorithmically found a route from each cell in the grid to Rome, resulting in about half a million routes total. Yep, there seems to be a way from Rome from every point.

Above is the map of these routes. Road segments used more frequently were drawn thicker, and as you might expect you get what looks like a root system through the continent. I’m guessing thicker lines are highways and freeways.

Moovel did the same with cities named Rome in the United States and the state capitals. Pretty sweet.

Getting to 100 percent renewable energy seems like such a far away goal at this point in time – which is why Mark Jacobson has a plan.

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford engineering professor, believes the world can eliminate fossil fuels and rely on 100 percent renewable energy. Following up on his state-by-state road map for the United States, he has now released data on plans for how 139 countries could wean themselves from coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.

The plan provides an energy breakdown for each country, and the National Geographic graphic shows how that compares to other countries incorporated in the plan.

See also the state-by-state plan for the United States, which shows breakdowns in the same fashion.

NASA mapped the annual cycle of all plant life on the planet in this animated map.

Satellite instruments reveal the yearly cycle of plant life on the land and in the water. On land, the images represent the density of plant growth, while in the oceans they show the chlorophyll concentration from tiny, plant-like organisms called phytoplankton. From December to February, during the northern hemisphere winter, plant life in the higher latitudes is minimal and receives little sunlight.

See also John Nelson’s breathing earth that used satellite imagery.

With recent events, you’ve likely seen the articles and graphics that get into the number of mass shootings this year and further into the past. You might have noticed that the numbers seem to vary depending on where you look, and the difference likely stems from how “mass shooting” is defined by the author.

Kevin Schaul for the Washington Post provides a straightforward interactive that uses a shootings dataset from Reddit, but shows how the count quickly changes depending on how your definition.

Does your vote matter? Aaron Bycoffe and David Wasserman for FiveThirtyEight provide an interactive that shows what states might switch sides if you changed turnout rate and party preference for various demographic groups.

There’s a dragger on the bottom for each group, where the vertical axis is the turnout rate and the horizontal is party preference. As you click and drag, states move back and forth accordingly.

The transition of states from one side to the other works well in this case, and as a whole, the interactive provides clarity to what I think might seem like a confusing statistical model.

In their annual survey that tests public perception against reality, Ipsos Mori asked people about their own country’s numbers. What’s the obesity rate in your country? What percentage of people in your country are immigrants? The Guardian setup the quiz so that you can see how your own perceptions compare against both reality and others’ in your country.
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