List of Physical Visualizations
A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.
Tags: dataviz
134
Sunday, October 18th, 2020
Friday, July 31st, 2020
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:
All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.
You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.
It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.
Saturday, May 23rd, 2020
Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney
I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Thursday, February 20th, 2020
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
Wednesday, February 19th, 2020
Slopes | Tinkersynth
Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.
The interface is quite delightful!
Saturday, February 15th, 2020
The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
Saturday, January 25th, 2020
Draw all roads in a city at once
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
Friday, December 13th, 2019
The Deep Sea
After showing us the size of space, here’s a fascinating intereactive visualisation of the ocean depths.
Monday, December 2nd, 2019
The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times
The design history of the New York subway map.
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Tuesday, October 8th, 2019
Southern Mosaic
A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019
Request mapping
The Request Map Generator is a terrific tool. It’s made by Simon Hearne and uses the WebPageTest API.
You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.
I was wondering… Wouldn’t it be great if this were built into browsers?
We already have a “Network” tab in our developer tools. The purpose of this tab is to show requests coming in. The browser already has all the information it needs to make a diagram of requests in the same that the request map generator does.
In Firefox, there’s a little clock icon in the bottom left corner of the “Network” tab. Clicking that shows a pie-chart view of requests. That’s useful, but I’d love it if there were the option to also see the connected circles that the request map generator shows.
Just a thought.
Monday, July 15th, 2019
Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.
Monday, July 1st, 2019
The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Sunday, June 30th, 2019
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019
Complexity Explorables
A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.
Wednesday, April 24th, 2019
Earth day at Clearleft
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Monday, April 8th, 2019
Atlas of Urban Expansion
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Monday, March 18th, 2019
Brendan Dawes - The Art of Cybersecurity
Some lovely data visualisation by Brendan:
The work features three main components — the threats, represented by black obelisk style objects, the system which detects and deals with these threats, represented by an organic mesh like structure, and finally the creativity that is allowed to flow because the threats have been neutralised.
HTML periodical table (built with CSS grid)
This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:
- Root elements
- Scripting
- Interactive elements
- Document metadata
- Edits
- Tabular data
- Grouping content
- Embedded content
- Forms
- Sections
- Text-level semantics